By Art Raymond, Deseret News

SALT LAKE CITY — Just a month after Astrobotic Technology's Peregrine moon mission failed due to a post-launch fuel leak, another private U.S. space company is headed to the moon. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared off a Cape Canaveral launch pad early Thursday morning, carrying Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lunar lander.

While the first signs of trouble for Peregrine arose shortly after the lander separated from its ride on United Launch Alliance's brand-new Vulcan rocket on Jan. 8, Houston-based Intuitive Machines was reporting an all-systems-go status for Odysseus. It parted ways with SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 about 48 minutes after launch from Florida's Kennedy Space Center.

Following the successful separation procedure, Intuitive Machines said Odysseus had achieved "a stable attitude, solar charging and radio communications contact with the company's mission operations center in Houston."

Like the failed Astrobotic mission, Intuitive Machines' IM-1 mission is carrying NASA payloads to the moon and received a portion of its funding through the U.S. space agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative.

Per its mission schedule, Odysseus is due to land at the Malapert A crater near the moon's south pole on Feb. 22. The south pole is of particular interest to NASA as an area that has been identified as the most likely to hold frozen reserves of water, an essential element and potential source from which oxygen and hydrogen could be extracted for future missions.

If successful, the IM-1 mission would mark the first return of a U.S. spacecraft to the moon since the 1972 visit by NASA's Apollo 17 crew. Intuitive Machines would also become the first private company to execute a controlled landing on the lunar surface.

'The immense challenges'

Besides Astrobotic's attempt with Peregrine, two other private moon landing tries, one each by companies from Israel and Japan, have met with failure, a factor not lost on Intuitive Machines' co-founder and CEO Steve Altemus.

"We are keenly aware of the immense challenges that lie ahead," Altemus said in a Thursday press statement.

https://www.ksl.com/article/50879653/intuitive-machines-ready-to-conquer-the-moon-with-nasa-backed-mission