ATLANTA — Last week, NASA celebrated a successful commercial launch to the moon, and on Thursday, it's expected to land on the south side of the moon.
This mission with Intuitive Machines signifies a significant milestone in lunar exploration efforts. It's part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services Initiative (CLPS), where they collaborate with US companies to facilitate missions to the moon.
The last time the US went to the moon was in 1972. Live landing coverage will air on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website. Coverage will include live streaming and blog updates beginning at 4:15 p.m. as the landing milestones occur.
11Alive's Meteorologist, Chesley McNeil, spoke with Dr. Joel Kearns, NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration, about the program's initiatives.
(These responses have been edited for clarity; watch the interview in the video player above and below.)
McNeil: Why has it taken so long for us to revisit the moon since the last crewed mission in 1972?
Kearns: Well, I would say that we've spent a lot of time exploring other planets robotically since then, but for the past couple of years, there's been a renewed focus to go to the moon and explore places of the moon that have never been explored before by anyone, and potentially use the moon as a jumping off point to send astronauts from there all the way up to Mars and other planets.
McNeil: Could you elaborate on the mission's objectives and why it's carrying cargo instead of humans?
Kearns: This is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services Initiative, or CLPS, where instead of building our own spaceships or having our own mission, we go out and buy passage on US companies' missions that are going to the moon. Now, NASA initiated this idea several years ago because we knew we wanted to go back to the moon over and over to prepare to send astronauts there to understand the moon better, and as I said, using it as a jumping-off point to go to other destinations like Mars.
So we're really good at building robotic space probes at NASA. You see that with the James Webb Space Telescope and the Mars rovers bringing pieces of asteroids back to Earth from far away, asteroids. But we knew we would be going back to the moon many, many, many times for different types of scientific and exploration work we wanted to do.
So instead of doing that ourselves, we put the challenge up to US companies and said, look, we will buy passage for our equipment on our experiments on a mission that you want to run, and that means it's your mission. We want you to safely get our equipment to the moon robotically and get our information back. But we're not going to do it. We're going to rely on you to do it. We're going to buy passage from you instead of doing it ourselves. And that's the new way we've been working for five years for these robotic moon landings.
McNeil: The mission is targeted towards the south pole of the moon. What significance does this region hold?
Kearns: Yes. It's a great area of interest for the future where folks want to go to the moon. Both to answer scientific questions about how the Earth and the moon formed and also to see if it's true what some of our scientific instruments tell us, which is that it's possible that there is frozen ice underneath the soil, the regular bits in the South Pole part of the moon.
And if it's there, you could not only answer questions about how water came to be on Earth and the other small, rocky planets in our solar system. But could we use that water ice for something in the future? Could we make rocket fuel out of it? You know, drinking water.
These are things that astronauts could use so they can sustainably explore the moon and not have to bring everything from Earth.
McNeil: There's talk about a lunar economy. Could you explain what that entails?
Kearns: Well, not only are we going out and, in effect, hitching a ride on US company's missions, but we want them to try to bring together other organizations, commercial companies, maybe governments outside the United States, companies outside the United States that also wanted to work on the moon.
You'll notice that on this Intuitive Machines mission, which, again, is not NASA's mission. It's a company's mission. There were six NASA experiments that we paid to have them take to the moon, but I think they also have six experiments that they went off and contracted with other people in addition to that. So that's like one aspect of it.
McNeil: So when can we expect to see humans return to the moon?
Kearns: NASA announced that we will be sending the first crew in many years to orbit the moon in late 2025. And then we're targeting to land the first humans at the south pole of the moon at the end of 2026.
McNeil: Last question for you, Joel. And I don't know if you can answer this or not, but is this all an attempt to maybe have people living on the moon, possibly one day?
Kearns: We want to send people to the moon for the long term to study the moon. I think we'll learn how straightforward it is to keep people...I could certainly envision the day in the future when people are living and working on the moon all the time.