Joe Skipper/Reuters
A lunar lander built by an American company successfully launched from Florida early Thursday, the latest entry in a wildly expensive and perilous race to become the first privately-owned spacecraft to touch down on the moon.
The lander named Odysseus from Houston-based aerospace business Intuitive Machines was atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that blasted off into the skies over Cape Canaveral just after 1 a.m. local time. If the lander succeeds in making a “soft landing” on the moon, it will be the first U.S. spacecraft to do so since the Apollo 17 landing in 1972.
The IM-1 flight is also carrying six NASA payloads of equipment designed to collect data about the moon before the space agency begins its planned missions to return astronauts to the lunar surface later in the decade. Odysseus is scheduled to land on Feb. 22 close to the moon’s south pole.