Fueling a spacecraft while it’s on a rocket? “Not trivial,” SpaceX official says.
Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket is seen with a Nova C lander tucked in its payload fairing. (credit: SpaceX)
Are you ready for round two of the lunar lottery?
As early as Thursday morning, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a privately developed lunar lander may launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The vehicle, built by a Houston-based company called Intuitive Machines, will be the second US-made lunar lander to launch from Florida in a little more than a month.
The renaissance in American lunar landers represents the vanguard of NASA's program to return humans to the Moon and establish a more permanent presence. (No US-built vehicle has made a soft landing on the Moon in more than half a century.) Part of that is finding lower-cost transportation services, which is what these privately built lunar landers are all about.