LIVE: Private American Spacecraft Lands on the Moon

to get this lunar landing opportunity in just a few minutes. Ninety seconds to take. Propulsion takes the flight pressure. All right. Ninety seconds until we begin that propulsive maneuver. Again, power descent initiation is about a 10 or 11 minute burn that will slow the spacecraft's descent. A lot's going to happen after that 10 minutes, Josh. This is a single continuous burn. After that, we're going to see a lot of events in rapid succession. Pitch over, vertical, and terminal descent. And we just heard another call out from the prop console saying that feed line prep is complete. What that means is NOVA-C's propulsion system, that mixture of liquid methane and liquid oxygen, that feed line is prepped, getting ready to go into an injector to blend those two propellants, the propellant and the oxidizer, and have ignition of PDI. We're tracking that in just under a minute, Gary. Converging on burn attitude. Lander is getting into the correct attitude required. Feed line prep complete, both sides. Another call for feed line prep complete for liquid methane and liquid oxygen in preparation for this PDI burn. Fifteen seconds, exec mode. Fifteen seconds to exec mode. We're tracking a little less than a minute, though, until the time of ignition for power descent initiation. Settling. Ignition. Throttling up. Main stage. There we heard main stage ignition. That's coming from our prop console, Rob. Good control. GNC call on good control. Thrust to weight 1.5. These are great call outs in between our prop console and our flight manager, Scott Tamblyn, calling it as the data is feeding into the lander, which means we are continuing to have good communications. The lander is sending that back to flight controllers in NOVA control. Gary, something we prepared for, we planned on, is that loss of communications. And that's why we have this. That's a good thrust control. It's a good thrust control call from prop. But that's why we have this autonomous lunar lander. You know, we program, we know that, hey, we want to light PDI in this moment. These are the steps you need to get there. But from here on, this is an autonomous lunar lander. And flight controllers are monitoring communications and tracking the progress right along with the public right now with us. NOVA-C has the helm. It is in control and is making the decisions necessary to ensure a soft landing. We heard call outs about thrust, full thrust. Right now, there is the ability to throttle that thrust. And we'll see that throughout the descent as the fuel tanks continue to unload. And we expel that propellant. And we did have a few questions come in about how much gas we're giving this to slow down the vehicle, and we want to remind folks that this PDI burn goes in just about 90 percent right on time. So it goes in at 90 percent in order to, if the lander makes a decision and says, I need to slow down more and make a decision to make a safe landing, it's able to add a little bit more oomph and make that decision a reality rather than just a possibility. FIDO, I'm showing 500 kilometers to target, but my display's a little bit stale. That's the mission director, Tim Crane, calling about 500 kilometers, but stating that his information might be just a bit stale. 1,000 PSI in the helium tank. That's part of the reason we're showing this animation, Josh. Of course, this is not telemetry driven. We're just showing you exactly what's happening as we hear the calls. This information is relayed through the audio loops. Not enough bandwidth to do a live stream of this. So we're relying on the data that's being fed from Nova C to Nova Control. Now, that data is going into the flight controllers. And what you're seeing on your screen right now is just to give you an idea of the vehicle's attitude. You heard them talking about moving to a burn attitude. This is what we expect Nova C is doing right now. It is a simulation in the large screen just to give you an idea of what's happening over these critical approximate 10, 11 minutes of PDI, Powered Descent Initiation, trying to slow Nova C down, bring that acceleration down to about 1,800 meters per second. And there's some follow on steps after that, Gary. It involves pitching over the lander using that gimballed engine. We heard the maneuver to burn attitude followed by main engine gimbal checkout. So they'll use that gimbal to pitch the lander over and start a vertical descent. This is where we start getting a little tricky as far as there is a final approach. It may add a few seconds. It may add a little bit of time. But we are intended to land right around 1724. That's 524 p.m. Central time. But know that there is some give and take. We're also expecting, plan for, and train for a little bit of loss of communication during this process. That's right. And that communication is absolutely important. And part of the reason, and we've been stressing this, Josh, is the autonomous operations of Nova C. Part of that is when it, after it performs that pitch over maneuver. Four hundred seconds to go in breaking one. Good control. FIDOIC TRND pause processing. In flight. All right. That was the call that we were waiting for. That was our major problem we've been working on in this dynamic situation is getting those images processed from HRN camera, TRN camera, which in this case, a dynamic situation, we had to improvise a little bit and reach into those two laser beams from NDL, figure out a patch while we were in lunar orbit, just about two hours. And it sounds like we are getting good readings from those images. Absolutely remarkable feat. We also happened to hear, I think it was 400 seconds remaining. That was coming from FIDO and flight dynamics. Sean Stewart working the console this evening. There's excellent calls to hear hazard relative navigation is going to be used after the pitch over maneuver. This allows Nova C to make some decisions and scan the landing site underneath it and make decisions in an area that calculates the terrain to make sure that it's landing in a safe landing zone. Right. So we finish up PDI, pitch over, and we have to use that hazard relative navigation and critical tool in order to land on the moon to make those decisions. Right. There's no human eyes, human elements deciding, okay, I see the hazard. I need to steer this way or maybe press the gas, press the brakes. This all happens autonomously, and this is a huge requirement and a great call out to hear about the HRN camera system and processing those images. Right now, I am tracking 516 p.m. We expect PDI to go until about 521, 522. Three hundred seconds and breaking one. Or about 300 seconds to approximate those numbers. Very precise. Josh, after those final series. Thrust to weight is 1.7. Following along. After those critical maneuvers. Committed thrust to 90 percent. Ninety percent thrust. We'll hear those call outs periodically. We started at full thrust, 90 percent. We're still throttling. And good performance on that engine. That's a great call out. Two things there. Nominal performance on this engine as well as the helium tank. So what we haven't mentioned so far in the show is that the helium tank pressurizes that liquid methane and liquid oxygen tank. But in addition, it's also used for reaction control system. Those are the small spurts that you see at the top of the lander in the animation that control the vehicle's attitude. So for things like landing on the moon, you really want to land at the right attitude. That way your antennas are facing back direct line of sight to earth and you can get that ultimate confirmation once you do suspect that you have landed on the moon. The antenna alignment is an important element of landing on the moon, Josh. We're expecting the high gain antennas to be pointed towards earth to confirm. But there may be a delay. We are expecting some sort of delay. I had to talk into the mission directors about how quickly we could receive a positive confirmation after this landing process is through. And there was some dispute over how long the earliest was just about 15 seconds after we see timing of when the event is supposed to happen. So right now we're tracking about 524 p.m. Central Standard Time. So maybe anywhere from 15 seconds after that, maybe a few minutes, two to three minutes while we work to acquire that signal. Because as you mentioned, the lander is going to a general area. Nine kilometers altitude. Nine kilometers altitude call from Tim Crane. The lander is going into a general area that we say, this is the general area we want you to fly to. It's using that hazard navigation to make better decisions about this is an area with the least amount of slope. This is an area that's free of boulders and other obstacles. So it's making autonomous decisions about where to go. Three minutes to go. Breaking one. Three minutes call. Just to wrap that up, when the lander is making those decisions, Gary, it's also very difficult to track. We've been very fortunate thus far tracking communications to this point. To wrap that up, Josh, three minutes. That brings us to just shy of 522 p.m. Central Time. We should hear that the power descent initiation burn is complete. Then we'll begin the next series of maneuvers to get us towards vertical and terminal descent. It starts with the pitch over. And just looking at our notes here, we did go into this burn expecting pitch over at 521 and 57 seconds. So good call out on the timing of that maneuver. It's important to remember PDI starts an engine burn that does not stop until landing. So this is a throttlable liquid methane liquid oxygen engine. We lit the engine at PDI. And while we are changing into a pitch over, vertical descent and terminal descent and then landing, that is a throttle down to the lunar surface. And when we do get out of PDI, if we hear that call of PDI complete, good burn, everything after that is going to happen in very quick succession, Gary. The time it takes to go from pitch over to landing or what we estimate landing to be, just looking at maybe 90 seconds is what we expect nominally. There is some wiggle room. Three minutes to touchdown call from the mission director. Burn on time landing, that sets us a little after 523 p.m. central time. Right, our notes going into this burn, 523 and 25 seconds. The autonomous operations, Josh, sets this to a clock. This is exactly what we got relayed before the start of our coverage today. We're right on track. Depause, terrain relative navigation measurements. Excellent call out. That solution the flight controllers were working so hard on to make sure HRN was working, pulling on extra resources that weren't originally planned for from those two laser beams from NDL. It appears and sounds like that solution is working. And the people working to patch that software were certainly under pressure. The clock was ticking as we went into that extra lunar orbit. It wasn't a situation where we could just sit in lunar orbit and try to solve our problems indefinitely. And it's sounding good so far on the call outs. Two minutes remaining until touchdown. Two minutes to touchdown. That required a patch to be designed on the ground and uplinked to Nova C to confirm that those laser sensors on NASA's navigation Doppler LIDAR could be routed to the terrain relative navigation and hazard relative navigation. That call out is fantastic. Fido, you have an altitude reading. Standing by to see if we can get an altitude reading from Fido here. That's flight dynamics officer Sean Stewart on blue team. Over to Jimbo. That's Ted. Sounds like we have some data that confirms pitch over. This starts the HDA process. That's hazard detection avoidance throughout this show. You've heard Gary and I talking about the problem that was attempted to be solved in lunar orbit, making the decision to not only postpone this show. NDL indicates altitude at 1,000 meters. 1,000 meters call out from NDL. That is coming from flight management. This is a system right now. NDL was not intended to be the primary landing system on this. Instead, we're using two laser beams from NDL and feeding that into that hazard detection and avoidance system that you see on your screen right now with the lander making autonomous decisions about where it wants to land. That is generally. Less than one minute remaining to touchdown. Less than one minute remaining for touchdown. And again, that's the time of touchdown. It may take some time to actually confirm the status of the lander. And in this process, we do have a deployment of Eagle Cam attempting to take the third person images of Nova C going down to the lunar surface. We are inside of one minute, Gary. Yes, we're willing to blow down. And we're tracking here in the broadcast booth. The clock has reached the expected. May take a minute for comms to reestablish. Stand by. There it is. Mission director beating us to it. We've reached the expected time of landing. But now is the process of waiting for comms. And we are in standby mode, as you heard it from the mission director, Dr. Tim Crane. And one minute has elapsed from the notes that we have, Gary, of that original burn starting at PDI. You have carrier lock. That's MD asking if we are getting the ground stations locked on to Nova C. That carrier lock call, Gary, we expect that to come from ground net or comm. That conversation possibly not happening on our public channel that we have access to. We're just standing by to hear that come through the channels as we approach almost two minutes since we estimated the landing time. We did get a few callouts on the side, folks coming into the room saying there was about a two-minute forgiveness in our timetables. We are checking our antenna reception. Checking antenna reception. And we're standing by, Gary. We're standing by just as we approach 526 p.m. Central Standard Time. Given those mission director's notes of the flexibility between what we were tracking, what we were given was just about 524. All stations, this is MD. Please look back through your logs and confirm the last information you had, and we'll determine this is a comm outage. And that's the mission director, Gary. These are our notes here of what we believed. We talked about the comm outages with the lander making autonomous decisions. This is the process of going through the last bit of data that came into NOVA control and working to verify, okay, this is the last bit of data. Where was this, was the lander possibly going? How do we look for it and establish those communications? NOVA-C uses four antennas placed at the top of the lander that are designed to capture these communications. But we did expect this. We talked about it, that this is a communications challenge in it of itself. And right now we're standing by to hear that communications call out. We're just a little more than three minutes from the time of the, when the clock reached zero for NOVA-C landing on the moon. And we just checked with our team here in the broadcast booth, decided to let's stay on this. All the chatter we are not hearing on this public channel, Gary, all things indicate that we are working to solve a communications, a possible communications challenge in this moment. So we're going to continue to stand by. For those following along. MD Prime on I-1. Go for Prime. Yeah, I guess you hold the room looking for states. And we're going to go ahead and cycle the ground transmitter on Goon-Hilly and do some RF sweeps, is that your plan? That's correct. Roger, copy. And that's just what we had in mind in our notes, Gary, is that if we encounter a communications challenge, we mentioned how difficult it is to land on the moon and continually have those communications. What you just heard there is folks talking about using the Goon-Hilly Earth Station Limited dish in the UK to do a sweep looking for that signal. We mentioned that autonomous process of the lander reassigning itself somewhere that it believes is safe going into it. We heard that the HRN camera was functioning and able to make those decisions after what was a two hour orbit of problem solving with intuitive machines as TRN and HRN cameras. The laser range finders assigned to those, those are the ones that intuitive machines installed inside the navigation pods. The laser range finders were not activated. We went to NASA and asked to use two of the laser beams on the navigation Doppler LiDAR. That's right. And spent two hours in orbit. Team, we're going to confirm our pointing vector with our antenna for post-landing. Yep. We spent about two hours in orbit to solve that problem. We got good readings on the way down. And right now, we are working to confirm communications on the surface of the moon, roughly around the Malapert A region, that is the South Pole region of the moon. That's right. What we do know is the power descent initiation. We were following along in the status calls. We executed a pitch over maneuver, and we're counting down the clock to a landing time of 523 p.m. central time. Josh described those processes of working on the communications component to confirm data from the lander, pulsing the teams surrounding him to check the status of Nova C and the data that they were receiving here at Nova Control to confirm landing. Part of that, Josh, as you described, is communications. We're standing by. Flight OMD on IM1. OMD. I'm looking at our phase plane there for the last part of the flight. It looks like we had excellent pitch and yaw control throughout, but I did see a little bit of a roll excursion. Could it be that we landed off angle and roll in the final phase? So I do see we had up to an eight-degree excursion. We're about to begin the roll maneuver, which is about. Terminal phase. Terminal phase, which is a large roll maneuver to get to the landing attitude. That's the last data point I have. But up until that point, we were really solid. Right. So terminal phase begins at 30 meters? Or post-HDA? Post-HDA. 400 meters. Very good. And that's a great conversation confirming. That's good ground network. Good for box scan. Make that go. That was good confirmation of the process that we were very familiar with, talking about the attitude of the lander, making sure that those antennas are within direct line of sight with Earth stations. Ground stations on Earth, excuse me. Mission director, all stations are also updating our pointing vector with our dishes to make sure that they're tuned in on our final landing site. There's a call. We're searching for that communications back to the ground station. This one particularly is in the UK that's tracking us. And it's important to note, Gary, that we have an entire network dedicated to working these communications problems. It's been active this entire mission. And the largest, most powerful dish out of all of them is about a 64-meter dish in Australia. That time to search with that opportunity with the largest, most powerful dish, we're looking at about 12 to 13 hours after our estimated touchdown. So this is a process that we could be looking and searching for the lander's signal for confirmation for quite some time. But we're going to continue to listen in and stand by as our flight controllers are working with the ground station in the United Kingdom to work this issue, work this problem. It's another challenge, very similarly to the challenge solved just to make it this far. Signs of life. We have a return signal we're tracking. We have an onboard fault detection system for our communications that after 15 minutes with lack of communication will power cycle the radios. And then after that, for another 15 minutes, it will then switch antenna pairs. So we have some time here to evaluate. We do have signal that we're tracking. So we'll see what happens. There's a great call out about the autonomous systems installed on our Nova C-class lunar lander named Odysseus. The process he's mentioning, Gary, is very similar to the one that we were preparing ourselves for at AOS, to where the lander has systems in place to recycle its antennas, to switch antenna pairs. And it was very similar to what we thought we were going to need to do after acquisition of signal when we separated from the second stage of the launch vehicle. If we made it to a certain point, the lander was autonomously programmed to start taking matters into its own hands. And that was the information that our mission director, Dr. Jim Hannibal. We're not dead yet. We're also not dead yet. And the key here, Josh, is patience. It's 5.34 p.m. Mission director Tim Crane confirming that it could take two phases of 15-minute increments to confirm the status of the landing. So we could be here, and we'll stand by and monitor as Nova Control continues to work this issue. Yeah, tense moments inside of mission control with the most qualified folks. We're picking up a signal from our high-gain antenna and transmitter. It's faint, but it's there. So stand by, folks. We'll see what's happening here. All right. We're going to continue to stand by. Let's keep this camera on inside of Nova Control. It sounds like we are getting some kind of faint signal. I want to send a series of commands to reactivate and make sure we're transmitting to keep the quasonics active. We're still standing by. The last call from mission director Dr. Tim Crane was that we were getting a faint signal from Odysseus' high-gain antenna. All stations, this is mission director on IM-1. We're evaluating how we can refine that signal and dial in the pointing for Odysseus. What we can confirm without a doubt is our equipment is on the surface of the moon, and we are transmitting. So congratulations, IM team. We'll see how much more we can get from that. An excellent call from our mission director, Dr. Tim Crane. And over to our CEO, Steve Altemus. Yeah, if I could just pass on a few words to the entire team in Intuitive Machines at SuperBAB and here in the mission control. What an outstanding effort. I know this was a nail-biter, but we are on the surface, and we are transmitting, and welcome to the moon. Houston, Odysseus has found his new home. An excellent call, and this is our team of Intuitive Machines mechanics and their families, their friends, everyone who has sacrificed so much to make it this far. How about that call, Gary? That was something else, a faint signal. Now it's time to work on refining that signal. But Dr. Tim Crane, our mission director today, making the call, Odysseus has a new home. It shows the disciplines of the flight controllers in Nova Control. They waited until there was absolute confirmation that there was a signal, and then that was when they took the moment to celebrate. We saw that it wasn't just the individuals in Nova Control that contributed to the mission. The contributions to enable the success of NovaSea's landing on the moon stretches far and wide. We showed, of course, some of the folks watching there, but really it extends even farther than this. A wonderful and truly amazing moment to celebrate. The U.S. has landed on the moon once again. And to everyone, you mentioned it goes beyond just the folks that we saw on camera waiting and working through those tense moments, but their friends, their families, and everything it took to get to this point. We're still expecting an image. We expect that to come down sometime in the future, especially as we look towards some high-resolution images. Let's go ahead and it sounds like we do have a message we'd like to cut to. Can we have that message special for our folks, our employees, and folks watching at home? Hey, that's right. With NovaSea landing at Malapert A, congratulations, like you said, Josh, are flooding into the teams that made this happen. Really sets a tone for the American leadership and the future of a strong lunar economy. So here's NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. On the eighth day of a quarter-million-mile voyage, a voyage along the Great Cosmic Bridge from the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center to the target of the south pole of the moon, a commercial lander named Odysseus, powered by a company called Intuitive Machines, launched upon a SpaceX rocket carrying a bounty of NASA scientific instruments and bearing the dream of a new adventure, a new adventure in science, innovation, and American leadership in space, well, all of that aced the landing of a lifetime. Today, for the first time in more than a half-century, the U.S. has returned to the moon. Today, for the first time in the history of humanity, a commercial company, an American company, launched and led the voyage up there. And today is a day that shows the power and promise of NASA's commercial partnerships. Congratulations to everyone involved in this great and daring quest at Intuitive Machines, SpaceX, and right here at NASA. What a triumph. Odysseus has taken the moon. This feat is a giant leap forward for all of humanity. Stay tuned. All right, thank you, Administrator Nelson. Again, Nova Cee and the United States has landed on the moon at 5.23 p.m. Central Time today, February 22nd, 2024. Congratulations to Intuitive Machines on the successful landing. Science and data gathering is already underway and will continue for roughly seven days on the lunar surface, activating payloads and gathering important scientific data to help ensure future successes in Artemis missions. For more about NASA's CLPS initiative, visit nasa.gov slash CLPS. Gary, it's been quite a journey for all of us at Intuitive Machines. Thanks to NASA for the continued support to enable today's successful landing and, of course, everyone at Intuitive Machines, their friends and family who made all of this possible. That will wrap up our coverage of Intuitive Machines' IM-1 mission. Thanks for joining us.