Less than one minute remaining to touchdown less than one minute remaining for Touchdown last week several days after leaving Earth the Odysseus spacecraft was set to land on the moon as the spacecraft was kind of going through the the various Milestones uh you know kind of in this deorbit burn
And then going down and getting closer to the surface everything seemed to be going smoothly 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 until the moment just before landing
When contact with the spacecraft was lost and there was this long kind of nail-biting period of time where nothing was heard about 12 minutes went by which in space Landings can feel like an eternity and at that point you’re thinking it’s crashed it somehow has crashed but then all stations assist is
Uh Mission director on im1 we’re evaluating uh how we can refine that signal and uh dial in the pointing for our dishes what we can confirm without a doubt is our equipment is on the surface of the Moon and we are transmitting so congratulations IM am
Team we’ll see how much more we can get from that I know this was a nailbiter but we are on the on the surface and we are transmitting and uh welcome to the Moon The Landing didn’t exactly go as planned and that will change what odys
Is can do but this is still a pretty big deal the globe science reporter Ivan semenic is going to tell us why I’m Manar ramman Wilms and this is the deciel from the globe in mail Ian great to have you here thank you so Ivan this spacecraft Odus has now
Landed on the moon um but there have been other Landers on the moon right so why is this one a big deal that’s right people have been landing on the moon since the 1960s uh you know uh first with the Soviet Union Landing robots on the moon and then the United States and
Then finally of course with the apom missions Landing people on the moon so this is this has happened before uh and of course other countries have done so China has landed multiple times now India has landed it’s happened before but it’s still not easy the big
Difference here of course is this is the first private company you know a a commercial entity has created the spacecraft uh as opposed to a National Space Agency that’s a big difference uh because what it means is it’s sort of bringing the moon kind of drawing the moon into the envelope of commercial
Space flight it’s certainly possible to land on the moon but it’s a big lift for a company to do so and so I think even though there are issues with exactly how this Mission landed prior attempts by companies to land on the moon have ended in Failure so this really was one for
The history books yeah so this is this private company intuitive machines that that landed this and we learned over the weekend that yes it was a successful Landing but uh it is off kilter a little bit so can you can you tell me what happened or what we know of what
Happened so a couple of things happened on the way down the uh spacecraft first of all was meant to land using this Laser Rangefinder um it’s an autonomous event right like to some and these Landers have to land themselves because they can’t be steered down there’s too much
Of a time delay for that as they were preparing to land they realized there was a problem with this Rangefinder in fact the rangefinder was fine but there is a safety mechanism built in so that the laser doesn’t fire in the lab during testing so that you know it’s a safety
Feature um that was not disabled prior to putting the system on board the spacecraft and launching it and it can’t be done remotely the way it’s currently designed so someone forgot to take the safety off exactly intuitive machines basically said this is on us that they didn’t do this how they responded to
That is rather remarkable though I have to say once they realized that they weren’t going to be able to use that system there was another system on board a NASA liar system which could do a similar job it was there as a demonstration not to actually be part of
The landing but they very quickly realized we’ll have to use this instead they had to rewrite the software on the Fly wow so which changed some aspects of the landing and then uh it’s not clear whether these two things are connected or entirely separate but once the Lander
Got down towards the surface it seems to have had a bit of a sideways motion even as it was kind of descending vertically and it looks like uh perhaps one of its legs caught in a boulder or an obstacle or something happened that once it touched down it it pitched over onto its
Side it’s a fairly tall structure the spacecraft stands 4.3 m high so once it tipped over then it was on its side now it stayed alive because it’s got these solar panels the Sun comes in at a low angle this is landing down near the
South Pole of the moon so the sun is very close to the Horizon and enough sunlight landing on the solar panels to charge the batteries and it was able to communicate with Earth so the Lander was ontact but just on its side and you said it landed near the South Pole of the
Moon so what’s the significance why did it land there so the South Pole of the moon is an area of high scientific curiosity it’s because uh you know the Moon is normally quite dry it’s obviously airless there’s no water on the moon except at the South Pole
Because the angle of the sun is so low you could have these craters and low-lying areas where sunlight never quite gets into those dark places and that means that ice can be stable there uh because it’s never getting direct sunlight so water vapor that gets trapped in these places can freeze and
Ice can mix in with the soil uh and the water vapor might come from comets for example used to imagine billions of years of comets kind of hitting the moon uh vaporizing and some of that water vapor gets trapped in these dark shadowed areas so over time it appears
From indirect evidence that water ice has accumulated in these dark areas and that is a resource obviously you can take the ice and turn it into water and use it for life support but also it can be turned into fuel potentially water you can separate the hydrogen and the
Oxygen in water use it for fuel so it’s a resource that uh people want to explore and exploit potentially and that has made the South Pole sort of the hot spot in a way for lunar exploration at least until people have a better idea of
What’s there so kind of like a I don’t know like a a gas station on the moon in in a way possibly possibly and that’s and that’s part of the objective is to check this out so in fact not only are number of the Landers going there the
The uncrewed Landers but the first human Mission the first mission that will return people to the Moon is also heading for the near the South Pole not far from where Odus landed I got to ask too because like often when we’re looking for water we’re looking for
Signs of Life are they looking for signs of life here is that a possibility this is not a life Quest this is really about what does the moon have to offer and having ice would be and not having to carry all the water with you if you were
Coming from Earth that would be a big asset so it sounds like we’re focused a little bit more on the South Pole now but have have we usually tried to land near the South Pole how have we usually done this this is the most southernly
Landing site on the Moon by far so one thing that intuitive machines has achieved not only is the first commercial Landing but the most southerly landing uh by anyone uh on the moon it’s not easy because uh as you leave the Earth it’s it turns out for dynamical reasons just for the sheer
Physics of it it it’s much easier to sort of land in the same plane that you’re leaving Earth from so if you take off kind of somewhere closer to earth’s equator it’s easier to land near the moon’s equator you kind of have to bend your path to go up and around the poles
Of the Moon that usually requires more energy it’s a more complicated effort so in the Apollo days uh certainly the the first moon landings were very much uh you can sort of see them clustered in a kind of band around the moon’s equator and only later uh people started to
Diverge from that okay so Ivan what was the spacecraft supposed to do on the moon the spacecraft is actually carrying a number of experiments six of them uh developed by NASA in part to uh test some of the technologies that NASA hopes to use in the future with its own lunar
Landings especially the lunar Landings that will take people back to the moon so testing navigation systems there’s like a laser reflector array and other aspects that might be used in future missions uh a way of gauging the mass of the spacecraft like how much propellant
Is left and so on so all of these things have to be tested and there’s no if you’re designing something for the moon for use on the moon the best way to test it is to actually put it on the moon and see how it works so that’s sort of
Brings that up to a higher level of confidence there are also some science experiments as well for example there’s a radio kind of like a radio dish or radio telescope experiment where they can study the kind of radio El electric environment around the lunar surface surf there’s another interesting
Experiment where it was designed to look at the dust plume that as the Lander is coming down it would be raising dust off the surface and if you study kind of the way the dust rises in response to the rocket coming down it actually tells you something about physical characteristics
Of the surface this is all useful information because again if you’re sending people there you want to know as much as possible about this particular part of the Moon where really nothing has landed before and I understand there’s also a canadian-made telescope as well right yes this is separate from
The NASA experiments there’s another uh group it’s called the international lunar Observatory Association they’re actually based in Hawaii they’re looking to test the moon as a sort of platform for doing astronomical observations of deep space but the company that built the telescope for them is a Canadian company in Ontario canadensis it’s also
The same company that’s building Canada’s first lunar rover which is still to come we I’m sure we’ll talk about about that in the future cool but anyway this uh this telescope was another interesting uh science uh demonstration experiment on the mission okay so that’s what’s supposed to happen
But of course we know that odys is is on its side right so I guess what happens to these experiments are they still possible it may be that some of these experiments are still possible or and some of them are are gathering data or we’re going through the process of
Gathering data which they would do automatically upon Landing there are two challenges here one obviously is that the spacecraft is on it side so that means some things may not work as planned in particular the telescope seems to be on the side there’s we don’t have direct evidence but there’s
Indirect evidence because of temperature readings and so on that the telescope is actually on the side that’s facing down so so it’s not even looking I don’t think we’re going to see the stars through that telescope in this case although there’ll still be useful information that comes from that
Experiment uh just in terms of its operations and so on but the other problem is the bandwidth of communications because the High Gain antenna at this on the spacecraft is not pointing at Earth and instead the signal is probably bouncing off the lunar surface it’s coming to Earth very weakly
Which means the bandwidth is very low there’s just a very limited amount of data that can be sent back you know in in a given amount of time so that means the flight controllers will have to really think carefully about what information the Lander sends back before
It dies it appears that it’s only expected to last you know maybe not past Tuesday of this week so by the time this episode airs by the time you’re hearing this it may already be gone it’s hard to predict exactly what’s going to happen but with whatever time is available the
Mission team will have to be very careful about how they prioritize the data that’s coming down and I’m sure they’ll prioritize the information that will most benefit future Landings so maybe more more of the technical information because again I can’t overstate this this is a huge
Achievement it’s is not easy to do this it’s never been done by a private company before it’s just the first of many there are other companies planning other missions they’re all watching each other in a fairly Cooperative way and I think we’re probably as you know this is
The tip of the iceberg and we’re going to see a lot more of these we’ll be back in a minute so odsis was landed by a private company intuitive machines uh how involved has the private sphere been in space exploration up until now this is uh a fascinating transition and it’s
Really an extension of something that we saw in the first decade of this Century the previous um kind of template for space exploration was that you have a big National Space Program like a NASA and of course in Canada we have the Canadian space agency in Europe you’ve
Got the European space agency where where European countries collaborate and they have sort of a a unified space agency and you know China Russia and so on what has changed is that as technology becomes more robust as uh electronics improve as knowledge and Designs improve it’s becoming more
Achievable for private companies to do this and uh you know around 2006 2007 there was this interesting moment where NASA decided to open the door or to private companies to build Rockets to supply the space station now in the past of course NASA has employed contractors uh you know Boeing and lock
Heat and so on these are private companies that would build the things that NASA needed but NASA was always in charge of the mission so this was um a big Paradigm Shift where NASA would say actually we don’t care how you do it just we need someone to deliver
Cargo to the space station for example so you build a rocket you demonstrate that it works we’ll give you some cargo we’ll pay for it we’ll pay for the ride so that opened the door to SpaceX for example and a number of other companies that uh became private launch systems to
Low earth orbit Supply you know and with with NASA sort of providing that incentive and of course the the benefit from that was that it wasn’t just NASA that became the customer but lots of other companies lots of other people who want access to space now purchase a
Launch on a SpaceX rocket in fact adicus was launched by SpaceX rocket so it’s you could sort of see how this bootstraps so it was the same idea that this NASA program was developed called uh it was called clips and the program was basically to have a number of a
Number of companies devise methods of getting materials to the Moon uh so that would be their job and NASA would pay for the ride so I guess Ian though what do it what does it mean for space exploration that a private company has now done this I I think what it means is
It increases the number of Pathways to the Moon uh just as we see that SpaceX blue origin and other companies have increased the number of Pathways into lower orb but and that will benefit any number of participants you can imagine other companies that want to have access
To space for some reason or in this case to the lunar surface you can imagine researchers you know University suppose you’re a university res researcher and you have an experiment you’d like to try on the moon either you can wait 20 years and hope that your National Space Agency
Prioritizes a moon mission and maybe they choose your experiment and maybe they’ll go there or you can just say look this is a small experiment uh you know maybe for X thousands of dollars I can put it on this Mission and it’ll be delivered to the Moon along with a whole
Bunch of other experiments so I think it’s an accelerant getting people to think about the moon think about what they might want to do there uh for commercial or non-commercial purposes but it’s just opening the doorway okay so it might provide more opportunities but I I have to wonder like are there
Are there concerns about having private companies operating on the moon I think at this point people in the space sector would say that it is that it would benefit everyone to have more development of technology and access you know when people worry about you know environment or exploitation I mean the
Moon is is not a living world right we so there aren’t environmental issues like that on the on the moon’s surface I suppose the big question is going to come in the future when uh there are enough actors and enough interests that there might be competing interests on
The moon uh you know just as there might be on the ocean floor or in Antarctica and people are already looking to the kinds of treaties and other International mechanisms that might try to manage uh what happens when you have a lot of different interests uh you know
Going out to kind of a a distant resource the moon at the moment is a resource for Earth that’s sort of how it’s being regarded in this situation but at this point it’s still very much uh well let’s go and see what’s there yeah so we’re still at an early stage
But I guess like since nobody has jurisdiction really over the moon uh just going back to the example we were talking about earlier right if a company finds lunar ice and starts making Rocket Fuel and start selling it like I guess they would be allowed to do that I I
Think there’s no restriction on that right there is something called the Artemis Accords and so this is something that the United States has uh uh developed so that it has Partnerships with other countries and other players on the moon there are moves to try to I think kind of develop a framework for
For how the moon will enter into the sphere of uh of human activity and com Commerce just as low earth orbit has now but even in low earth orbit we know that uh you know China has experimented with killer satellites other you know there have been other uh uses of space that
People aren’t necessarily thrilled with but um we’re at the beginning of of this next phase in space exploration so we’ll have to see what happens yeah so maybe just lastly here Ian if I can get you to look to the future you know if things do
Continue as they are and we start to see lots of private companies operating on the moon in the future um you know what what might that look like what would what would be happening on the moon what this Mission has me thinking about you know despite the fact that
This Lander is not going to last very long as time goes on I think we’re going to get to a point where there is always something operating on the moon there may not be people always on the Moon I mean right now we have people continuously in space thanks to the
International Space Station it’s been years and years and years now we don’t even think twice about it you know there was a time where that wasn’t the case I think we’re moving to a time very soon where there will always be maybe not humans but something working on the moon
And and there will just be this continuous activity uh taking place on the moon gradually exploring and developing that Ian thank you so much for taking the time to be here today thank you that’s it for today I’m man ramman Wilms our producers are meline white
Cheryl Sou land and Rachel ly mlin David Crosby edits the show Adrien CH is our senior producer and Angela Penza is our executive editor thanks so much for listening and I’ll talk to you tomorrow
For the first time ever, a spacecraft built by a private company has landed on the moon. The robotic lander, named Odysseus, touched down in the south polar region on Thursday. But not before a nerve-wracking communications blackout and an off-kilter landing that have scientists racing against time.
What is Odysseus’ purpose? What could this mean for future space projects like NASA’s Artemis missions in 2026? Ivan Semeniuk, The Globe’s science reporter, joins the show to explain the historic feat.
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