The 18-meter (59 ft), four-stage solid-fuel rocket exploded seconds after lifting off just after 11:01 am (0201 GMT; 10:01 am Philippine time), leaving behind a large loud of smoke, a fire, fragments of the rocket and firefighting water sprays near the launch pad, visible on local media livestreams of the launch on the tip of mountainous Kii peninsula in western Japan.

Space One said the flight was “interrupted” after the launch and was investigating the situation. There was no immediate indication of what caused the explosion, or whether there were any injuries. Pads typically have no people anywhere nearby during a launch. Space One has said the launch is highly automated and requires roughly a dozen staff at the ground control center.

Kairos carried an experimental government satellite that can temporarily replace intelligence satellites in orbit if they fall offline.

Space One had planned the launch for Saturday but postponed it after a ship entered the nearby restricted sea area.

Although Japan is a relatively small player in the space race, the nation’s rocket developers are scrambling to build cheaper vehicles to capture booming demand for satellite launches from its government and from global clients.

Tokyo-based Space One was established in 2018 by a consortium of Japanese companies: Canon Electronics, the aerospace engineering unit of IHI, construction firm Shimizu, and the state-backed Development Bank of Japan. Two of Japan’s biggest banks, Mitsubishi UFJ and Mizuho, also own minority stakes.

Shares in Canon Electronics fell more than 9% after Wednesday’s failed launch.

Space One wants to offer “space courier services” to domestic and international clients, aiming to launch 20 rockets a year by the late 2020s, its president Masakazu Toyoda said. Although the company delayed Kairos’ inaugural launch window four times, it said orders for its second and third planned trips have been filled, including by an overseas customer.

Space One does not disclose Kairos’ launch costs, but company executive Kozo Abe said it is “competitive enough” against American rival Rocket Lab.

Rocket Lab has launched more than 40 Electron small rockets from New Zealand since 2017 at roughly $7 million per flight. Several Japanese companies have used Electron for their missions, including radar satellite makers iQPS and Synspective, and orbital debris-removal startup Astroscale.

Last month, state-funded Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully launched its new cost-efficient flagship rocket, the H3. JAXA completed a historic “pinpoint” moon landing this year, and the H3 is scheduled to carry about 20 satellites and probes to the space by 2030.

In 2019, Interstellar Technologies conducted Japan’s first privately developed rocket launch with its MOMO series, although without a full-scale satellite payload.

Partnering with the United States, Japan is seeking to revitalize its domestic aerospace industry to counter technological and military rivalry from China and Russia.

The government last year promised “comprehensive” support for space startups with technology critical for national security, as it seeks to build satellite constellations to ramp up intelligence capabilities.

Japan’s defense ministry on Friday said it had struck a deal with Space One to boost its rockets’ payload by experimenting with fuel-efficient methane engines. – Rappler.com

Scientists said on Wednesday, March 6, that Webb has spotted a galaxy where star formation had already ceased by roughly 13.1 billion years ago, 700 million years after the Big Bang event that gave rise to the universe. Many dead galaxies have been detected over the years, but this is the earliest by about 500 million years.

In some ways, this galaxy is like the late Hollywood actor James Dean, famous for his “live fast, die young” life story.

“The galaxy seemed to have lived fast and intensely, and then stopped forming stars very rapidly,” said astrophysicist Tobias Looser of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.

“In the first few hundred million years of its history, the universe was violent and active, with plenty of gas around to fuel star formation in galaxies. That makes this discovery particularly puzzling and interesting,” Looser added.

This galaxy is relatively small, with perhaps 100 million to one billion stars. That would put it in the neighborhood of the mass of the Small Magellanic Cloud dwarf galaxy situated near our Milky Way, though that one is still forming new stars.

After a galaxy stops forming new stars, it becomes a bit like a stellar graveyard.

“Once star formation ends, existing stars die and are not replaced. This happens in a hierarchical fashion, by order of stellar weight, because the most massive stars are the hottest and shine the brightest, and as a result have the shortest lives,” Kavli Institute astrophysicist and study co-author Francesco D’Eugenio said.

“As the hottest stars die, the galaxy color changes from blue – the color of hot stars – to yellow to red – the color of the least massive stars,” D’Eugenio added. “Stars about the mass of the sun live about 10 billion years. If this galaxy stopped forming stars at the time we observed it, there would be no sun-like stars left in it today. However, stars much less massive than the sun can live for trillions of years, so they would continue to shine long after star formation stopped.”

The researchers determined that this galaxy experienced a burst of star formation spanning 30 to 90 million years, then it suddenly stopped. They are trying to figure out why.

It could be, they said, due to the action of a supermassive black hole at the galactic center or a phenomenon called “feedback” – blasts of energy from newly formed stars – that pushed the gas needed to form new stars out of the galaxy.

“Alternatively, gas can be consumed very quickly by star formation, without being promptly replenished by fresh gas from the surroundings of the galaxy, resulting in galaxy starvation,” Looser said.

NASA’s Webb is able to look at greater distances, and thus farther back in time, than its Hubble Space Telescope predecessor. Among other discoveries, Webb has enabled astronomers to see the earliest-known galaxies, which have turned out to be larger and more plentiful than expected.

In the new study, the researchers were able to observe the dead galaxy at one moment in time. It is possible, they said, that it later resumed star formation.

“Some galaxies may undergo rejuvenation, if they can find fresh gas to convert into new stars,” D’Eugenio said. “We do not know the ultimate fate of this galaxy. This may depend on what mechanism caused star formation to stop.” – Rappler.com

Intuitive Machines, the Texas-based aerospace company that NASA paid $118 million to build and fly Odysseus, said its ground control team had received a final “farewell transmission” from the spacecraft before it went dark on the moon’s south pole region.

“Goodnight, Odie. We hope to hear from you again,” Intuitive said in an online update, referring to the spacecraft by the nickname its engineers had affectionately adopted for a lander they said proved to be more robust than expected.

Earlier in the day, Intuitive said its teams would program Odysseus to “phone home” to the company’s ground control center Houston if and when the spacecraft receives enough solar power to reawaken in three weeks with the next sunrise over its landing site.

The company previously said Odysseus would likely run out of battery power sometime Wednesday night, just after its sixth full day on the moon, as the sun sank low on the lunar horizon and solar energy regeneration became insufficient.

But Intuitive said on Thursday morning that Odysseus was “still kicking,” and that flight controllers would seek to download a final stream of data trasmitted the 239,000 miles (385,000km) to Earth before contact was lost.

Intuitive’s shares – which had nearly tripled and then plummeted in wild swings over the course of the mission – remained up about 20% from just before the launch, giving the company a market value of about $600 million.

The six-legged Nova-C-class lander, shaped like a hexagonal cylinder and standing 13 feet (4 m) tall, was launched on Feb. 15 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket supplied by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. It arrived in lunar orbit six days later.

The vehicle reached the lunar surface last Thursday after an 11th-hour navigational glitch and nail-biting descent that ended with Odysseus catching one of its feet on the ground and landing in a sharply tilted position, immediately impeding its operations.

Intuitive Machines have said human error was to blame for the navigational issue. Flight readiness teams had neglected to manually unlock a safety switch before launch, preventing subsequent activation of the vehicle’s laser-guided range finders and forcing flight engineers to hurriedly improvise an alternative during lunar orbit.

The last-minute work-around likely prevented a crash-landing but may have contributed to the vehicle landing askew, apparently catching a foot on the uneven surface and coming to rest leaning at a 30-degree angle, company officials said.

An image released on Wednesday showed the spacecraft as it was touching down on the surface, with its landing gear visibly damaged.

The company has said that two of the lander’s antennae were knocked out of commission, and its solar panels were likewise facing the wrong direction.

Despite persistent difficulties in communicating with the lander and keeping its solar batteries charged, NASA said it managed to extract some data from all six of its science payloads delivered by Odysseus.

Intuitive and NASA executives both hailed the science achieved and the “soft” lunar landing itself – the first ever by a commercially manufactured and operated space vehicle – as a key breakthrough in a new chapter of lunar exploration.

Odysseus was also the first US spacecraft to make a controlled descent to the lunar surface since NASA’s final crewed Apollo mission to the moon in 1972.

And it was the first under NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to send several more commercial robot landers to the moon on science scouting missions ahead of a planned return of astronauts to Earth’s only natural satellite later this decade.

To date, space agencies of just four other countries have ever achieved a “soft” moon landing – the former Soviet Union, China, India and, just last month, Japan, whose lander likewise tipped over on its side.

The United States is the only country ever to have sent humans to the lunar surface. – Rappler.com

Texas-based Intuitive Machines said in an online update on Tuesday, February 27, that its control center in Houston remained in contact with the lander as it “efficiently sent payload science data and imagery in furtherance of the company’s mission objectives.”

The spacecraft reached the lunar surface last Thursday, February 22, after an 11th-hour navigational glitch and white-knuckle descent that ended with Odysseus landing in a sideways or sharply tilted position that has impeded its communications and solar-charging capability.

Intuitive Machines said the next day that human error was to blame for the navigational issue. Flight readiness teams had neglected to manually unlock a safety switch before launch, preventing subsequent activation of the vehicle’s laser-guided range finders and forcing flight engineers to hurriedly improvise an alternative during lunar orbit.

An Intuitive executive told Reuters on Saturday, February 24, that the safety switch lapse stemmed from the company’s decision to forgo a test-firing of the laser system during pre-launch checks in order to save time and money.

Whether or not failure of the range finders and last-minute substitution of a workaround ultimately caused Odysseus to land in an off-kilter manner remained an open question, according to Intuitive officials.

Nevertheless, the company said last Friday, February 23, that two of the spacecraft’s communication antennae were knocked out of commission, pointed the wrong way, and that its solar panels were likewise facing the wrong direction, limiting the vehicle’s ability to recharge its batteries.

As a consequence, Intuitive said on Monday, February 26, that it expected to lose contact with Odysseus on Tuesday morning, cutting short the mission that held a dozen science instruments for NASA and several commercial customers and had been intended to operate on the moon for seven to 10 days.

Beside crater wall?

On Tuesday morning, Intuitive said controllers were still “working on final determination of battery life on the lander, which may continue up to an additional 10-20 hours.”

The latest update from the company indicated the spacecraft might last for a total of six days before the sun sets over the landing site.

The company’s shares closed 7% higher on Tuesday. The stock plummeted last week following news the spacecraft had landed askew.

It remained to be seen how much research data and imagery from payloads might go uncollected because of Odysseus’ cockeyed landing and shortened lunar lifespan.

NASA paid Intuitive $118 million to build and fly Odysseus.

NASA chief Bill Nelson told Reuters on Tuesday he understood that agency scientists expected to retrieve some data from all six of their payloads. He also said Odysseus apparently landed beside a crater wall and was leaning at a 12-degree angle, though it was not clear whether that meant 12 degrees from the surface or 12 degrees from an upright position.

Intuitive executives said on February 23 that engineers believed Odysseus had caught the foot of one of its landing legs on the lunar surface as it neared touchdown and tipped over before coming to rest horizontally, apparently propped up on a rock.

No photos from Odysseus on the lunar surface have been transmitted yet. But an image from an orbiting NASA spacecraft released on Monday showed the lander as a tiny speck near its intended destination in the moon’s south pole region.

Despite its less-than-ideal touchdown, Odysseus became the first US spacecraft to land on the moon since NASA’s last crewed Apollo mission to the lunar surface in 1972.

It was also the first lunar landing ever by a commercially manufactured and operated space vehicle, and the first under NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite this decade. – Rappler.com

Houston-based Intuitive Machines also revealed that human error led to a failure of the spacecraft’s laser-based range finders, how engineers detected the glitch by chance hours before landing time, and how they improvised an emergency fix that saved the mission from a probable crash.

Although the Odysseus made it to the surface intact on Thursday, analysis of data by flight engineers showed the six-legged craft apparently tripped over its own feet as it neared the end of its final descent, company officials said at a briefing the next day.

The spacecraft is believed to have caught one of its landing feet on the uneven lunar surface and tipped over, coming to rest sideways, propped up on a rock at one end, said CEO Stephen Altemus, whose company built and flew the lander.

Still, all indications are that Odysseus “is stable near or at our intended landing site,” close to a crater called Malapert A in the region of the moon’s south pole, Altemus told reporters.

“We do have communications with the lander,” and mission control operators are sending commands to the vehicle, Altemus said, adding that they were working to obtain the first photo images from the lunar surface from the landing site.

A brief mission status report posted to the company’s website earlier on Friday described Odysseus “alive and well.”

The company had said shortly after touchdown on Thursday that radio signals indicated Odysseus, a 13-foot-tall hexagonal cylinder, had landed in an upright position, but Altemus said that faulty conclusion was based on telemetry from before the landing.

Downsides of sideways

Although the lander’s sideways position is far from ideal, company officials said that all but one of its six NASA science and technology payloads were mounted on portions of the vehicle left exposed and receptive to communications, “which is very good for us,” Altemus said.

“We think we can meet all the needs of the commercial payloads” as well, he added.

However, two of the spacecraft’s antennae were left pointed at the surface, a circumstance that will limit communications with the lander, Altemus said.

Also the functionality of a solar energy panel on the top of Odysseus, now facing the wrong way, is uncertain, but a second array on the side of the spacecraft appears to be in working order, and the spacecraft’s batteries had been fully charged, he said.

The uncrewed robot spacecraft reached the lunar surface on Thursday after a nail-biting final approach and descent in which a problem with its navigation system surfaced, requiring flight controllers on the ground to employ an untested work-around to avoid what could have been a catastrophic crash landing.

The original laser-powered range finders had been rendered non-functional because company engineers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida had inadvertently failed to unlock a safety switch before the lander’s launch to space last Thursday, Altemus said.

“That was an oversight on our part,” he said, likening the overlooked switch to a safety mechanism on a firearm.

The problem was only detected by happenstance a week later during lunar orbit, with just hours to go before landing, when flight controllers were troubleshooting a different issue.

Otherwise, they might only have realized the safety lock was still on when it was time to power up the range finders during the last five minutes of descent, mission director Tim Crain said.

Tensions mounted as engineers determined that existing software aboard the spacecraft could not override the safety lock to activate the range finders, company officials said.

Ultimately, engineers scrambled to write software directing the lander instead to rely on an experimental NASA Lidar payload onboard – a remote sensing system that uses rapid pulses of laser-like light and their reflections to judge distances between objects.

Intended for use only as a technology demonstration, as well as a possible backup, NASA’s Lidar saved the day, though it was employed under extreme duress.

“It’s super high-stakes,” former SpaceX mission director Abhi Tripathi said. “The mission director has to make sure everyone does their job, and does their job perfectly, almost like a conductor.”

Crain said the spacecraft, burning a propulsion fuel of liquid methane and liquid oxygen for the first time in space, “performed flawlessly” during its seven-day flight to and in orbit around the moon.

The condition of Odysseus was murky immediately after its landing. It took some time after an anticipated radio blackout to reestablish communications with the spacecraft and determine its fate some 239,000 miles (384,000 km) from Earth.

When contact was finally renewed, the signal was faint, confirming that the lander had touched down but leaving mission control immediately uncertain as to the precise condition and position of the vehicle, company officials said during a webcast of the event on Thursday evening.

Crain said he believed that the payloads aboard the lander would be able to operate for about nine or 10 days, after which sun will have set on the polar landing site.

Shares of Intuitive Machines tumbled 30% in extended trade on Friday, wiping out all their rally in Friday’s market session after the company said its moon lander had tipped over. – Rappler.com

A spacecraft built and flown by Texas-based company Intuitive Machines landed near the south pole of the moon on Thursday, February 22, the first US touchdown on the lunar surface in more than half a century and the first ever achieved by the private sector.

The uncrewed six-legged robot lander, dubbed Odysseus, touched down at about 6:23 pm EST (2323 GMT), the company and NASA commentators said in a joint webcast of the landing from Intuitive Machines’ mission operations center in Houston.

The landing capped a nail-biting final approach and descent in which a problem surfaced with the spacecraft’s autonomous navigation system that required engineers on the ground to employ an untested work-around at the 11th hour.

It also took some time after an anticipated radio blackout to reestablish communications with the spacecraft and determine its fate some 239,000 miles (384,000 km) from Earth.

When contact was finally renewed, the signal was faint, confirming that the lander had touched down but leaving mission control immediately uncertain as to the precise condition and position of the vehicle, according to the webcast.

“Our equipment is on the surface of the moon, and we are transmitting, so congratulations IM team,” Intuitive Machines mission director Tim Crain was heard telling the operations center. “We’ll see what more we can get from that.”

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson immediately hailed the feat as a “triumph,” saying, “Odysseus has taken the moon.”

As planned, the spacecraft was believed to have come to rest at a crater named Malapert A near the moon’s south pole, according to the webcast. The spacecraft was not designed to provide live video of the landing, which came one day after the spacecraft reached lunar orbit and a week after its launch from Florida.

Thursday’s landing represented the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a US spacecraft since Apollo 17 in 1972, when NASA’s last crewed moon mission landed there with astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt.

To date, spacecraft from just four other countries have ever landed on the moon – the former Soviet Union, China, India, and, mostly recently, just last month, Japan. The United States is the only one ever to have sent humans to the lunar surface.

Odysseus is carrying a suite of scientific instruments and technology demonstrations for NASA and several commercial customers designed to operate for seven days on solar energy before the sun sets over the polar landing site.

The NASA payload will focus on collecting data on space weather interactions with the moon’s surface, radio astronomy and other aspects of the lunar environment for future landers and NASA’s planned return of astronauts later in the decade.

The IM-1 mission was sent on its way to the moon last Thursday atop a Falcon 9 rocket launched by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Dawn of Artemis

The arrival of Odysseus also marks the first “soft landing” on the moon ever by a commercially manufactured and operated vehicle and the first under NASA’s Artemis lunar program, as the US races to return astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite before China lands its own crewed spacecraft there.

NASA aims to land its first crewed Artemis in late 2026 as part of long-term, sustained lunar exploration and a stepping stone toward eventual human flights to Mars. The initiative focuses on the moon’s south pole in part because a presumed bounty of frozen water exists there that can be used for life support and production of rocket fuel.

A host of small landers like Odysseus are expected to pave the way under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, designed to deliver instruments and hardware to the moon at lower costs than the US space agency’s traditional method of building and launching those vehicles itself.

Leaning more heavily on smaller, less experienced private ventures comes with its own risks.

Just last month the lunar lander of another firm, Astrobotic Technology, suffered a propulsion system leak on its way to the moon shortly after being placed in orbit on January 8 by a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan rocket making its debut flight.

The malfunction of Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander marked the third failure of a private company to achieve a lunar touchdown, following ill-fated efforts by companies from Israel and Japan.

Although Odysseus is the latest star of NASA’s CLPS program, the IM-1 flight is considered an Intuitive Machines mission. The company was co-founded in 2013 by Stephen Altemus, former deputy director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and now the company’s president and CEO.

The proliferation of commercial space ventures has itself been driven by leaps in technology in recent decades. (READ: From the Moon’s south pole to an ice-covered ocean world, several exciting space missions are slated for launch in 2024)

The Apollo program and robot lunar Surveyor missions that preceded it flew at the very dawn of the computer age, before the advent of modern microchips, electronic sensors and software, or the development of super light-weight metal alloys and myriad other advances that have spurred a revolution in spaceflight. – Rappler.com

Play Video

HI-SEAS is a Mars and Moon exploration analog research station, where analog astronauts simulate arriving and living on Mars or the Moon. HI-SEAS analog astronauts have to live in a small habitat — a 1,200 square-foot dome on the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawai’i — with only five other analog astronauts or less.

For their day-to-day activities, analog astronauts have to go outside for extravehicular activities, like searching for NASA equipment and going down lava tubes — on top of doing their research in their respective fields. Atienza, a nutrition specialist, spent her days in the mission doing research on space nutrition.

During her live AMA (Ask Me Anything) session with Rappler, Atienza said the analog space mission is meant to find out which kind of people are best to send to live on Mars or the Moon. As part of the program, analog astronauts have to answer psychological surveys, which include questions like what time they slept and if they had conflicts with other crew members.

Atienza mentioned that space programs in past years would typically recruit sporty and adventurous people as astronauts. But Atienza said these are not requirements to become an analog astronaut, especially since adventure-seekers usually have a hard time expelling energy when enclosed in a small habitat for a long time.

“They’re looking for people who can be bored for a very, very long time. Imagine yourself living in Mars — or even just enclosed in a capsule traveling to Mars for four months. Can you do that? Can you be sitting in a capsule for four months?” Atienza said in a mix of Filipino and English.

Luckily for introverted Atienza, six days were not enough to make her feel bored. “The six days were not enough,” Atienza said in Filipino. “I’m very introverted. So I really like the feeling when I was inside the habitat.”

Dealing with crew members

Those who tuned in live to the AMA session were also curious about whether tension arose among the crew members during Atienza’s six-day stay at HI-SEAS.

“How do I start?” Atienza said with a laugh.

Fortunately, no big arguments occurred during Atienza’s HI-SEAS experience. But even when the program ran for just a few days, tension rose among the crew members when faced with dilemmas, like whether they should risk going down certain lava tubes or not during extravehicular activities.

Atienza mentioned conflicts like these were talked about in their daily debriefing sessions before going to bed. “We talked about the tensions…. I think it went okay in the end,” Atienza said in a mix of Filipino and English.

There were also times when they had to tackle unexpected challenges, like when the plastic bag containing their feces exploded.

“Of course, there’s no plumbing system [in the habitat]…. It’s a compost toilet…. We had to compost our manure…. When we were cleaning the toilet, the plastic bag containing the manure exploded and poop scattered…. It was hard to clean,” Atienza gladly shared in Filipino.

Atienza and her fellow crew members had to clean up one of their toilet areas for half a day.

Inclusivity in space programs

For those curious during the live AMA session, Atienza also shared that persons with disability can now also go to space.

“There are parabolic missions, parabolic flights, and even analog missions — for example, for Lunaris — that they cater for [persons with disability]…. Everything is changing right now. It’s becoming more inclusive,” Atienza said.

But for 31-year-old Atienza, there was a lack of women role models in science — at least for her generation — and the field of space science is still dominated by men.

“[In] our generation, I think people would underestimate the scientific and mathematical abilities of girls at a very young age…. At that early age, that’s where you start thinking about what you want to be in the future, right? When you make little girls feel that they’re not for science, they’re not for engineering, then they would believe that,” Atienza said in a mix of Filipino and English.

Luckily for her, she had women role models in STEM growing up — one of them her mother, who was a math teacher. And she hopes the situation is different today for the younger generations.

“Today, I can see that because of social media, [science is] beginning to open up to a lot of girls…. They can see female astronauts now.” —Rappler.com

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CAPE CANAVERAL, USA – A moon lander built by Houston-based aerospace company Intuitive Machines was launched from Florida early on Thursday, February 15, on a mission to conduct the first US lunar touchdown in more than a half century and the first by a privately owned spacecraft.

The company’s Nova-C lander, dubbed Odysseus, lifted off shortly after 1 am EST (0600 GMT; 2:00 pm Philippine time) atop a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket flown by Elon Musk’ SpaceX from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.

A live NASA-SpaceX online video feed showed the two-stage, 25-story rocket roaring off the launch pad and streaking into the dark sky over Florida’s Atlantic coast, trailed by a fiery yellowish plume of exhaust.

About 48 minutes after launch, the six-legged lander was shown being released from Falcon 9’s upper stage about 139 miles above Earth and drifting away on its voyage to the moon.

“IM-1 Odysseus lunar lander separation confirmed,” a mission controller was heard saying.

Moments later, mission operations in Houston received its first radio signals from Odysseus as the lander began an automated process of powering on its systems and orienting itself in space, according to webcast commentators.

Although considered an Intuitive Machines mission, the IM-1 flight is carrying six NASA payloads of instruments designed to gather data about the lunar environment ahead of NASA’s planned return of astronauts to the moon later this decade.

Thursday’s launch came a month after the lunar lander of another private firm, Astrobotic Technology, suffered a propulsion system leak on its way to the moon shortly after being placed in orbit on Jan. 8 by a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan rocket making its debut flight.

The failure of Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, which was also flying NASA payloads to the moon, marked the third time a private company had been unable to achieve a “soft landing” on the lunar surface, following ill-fated efforts by companies from Israel and Japan.

Those mishaps illustrated the risks NASA faces in leaning more heavily on the commercial sector than it had in the past to realize its spaceflight goals.

Plans call for Odysseus to reach its destination after a weeklongflight, with a Feb. 22 landing at crater Malapert A near the moon’s south pole.

If successful, the flight would represent the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a U.S. spacecraft since the final Apollo crewed moon mission in 1972, and the first by a private company.

The feat also would mark the first journey to the lunar surface under NASA’s Artemis moon program, as the U.S. races to return astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite before China lands its own crewed spacecraft there.

IM-1 is the latest test of NASA’s strategy of paying for the use of spacecraft built and owned by private companies to slash the cost of the Artemis missions, envisioned as precursors to human exploration of Mars.

By contrast, during the Apollo era, NASA bought rockets and other technology from the private sector, but owned and operated them itself.

NASA announced last month that it was delaying its target date for a first crewed Artemis moon landing from 2025 to late 2026, while China has said it was aiming for 2030.

Small landers such as Nova-C are expected to get there first, carrying instruments to closely survey the lunar landscape, its resources and potential hazards. Odysseus will focus on space weather interactions with the moon’s surface, radio astronomy, precision landing technologies and navigation.

Intuitive Machine’s IM-2 mission is scheduled to land at the lunar south pole in 2024, followed by an IM-3 mission later in the year with several small rovers.

Last month, Japan became the fifth country to place a lander on the moon, with its space agency JAXA achieving an unusually precise “pinpoint” touchdown of its SLIM probe last month. Last year, India became the fourth nation to land on the moon, after Russia failed in an attempt the same month.

The United States, the former Soviet Union and China are the only other countries that have carried out successful soft lunar touchdowns. China scored a world first in 2019 by achieving the first landing on the far side of the moon. – Rappler.com

“SpaceX has moved its state of incorporation from Delaware to Texas! If your company is still incorporated in Delaware, I recommend moving to another state as soon as possible,” Musk said on the platform, formerly known as Twitter.

The move comes after the billionaire founder and electric vehicle maker Tesla’s CEO said earlier this month that he will hold a shareholder vote to move Tesla’s state of incorporation to Texas, where it has its headquarters, after a Delaware judge invalidated his $56-billion pay package.

“The public vote is unequivocally in favor of Texas! Tesla will move immediately to hold a shareholder vote to transfer state of incorporation to Texas,” Musk said on X earlier this month after holding a poll where 87% respondents voted “yes” for Tesla’s change of incorporation.

Musk’s brain-chip implant company, Neuralink also changed its location of incorporation from Delaware to Nevada last week. – Rappler.com

A Reuters investigation late last year found that Musk’s rocket company disregarded worker-safety regulations and standard practices at its facilities nationwide. Through interviews and government records, the news organization documented at least 600 previously unreported injuries of SpaceX workers since 2014.

SpaceX has not responded to Reuters’ questions about any of the incidents, including the death of one worker and the injury of another who remains in a coma after his skull was fractured during a 2022 rocket engine malfunction. The company also did not respond to a request for comment about the new safety fine.

Inspectors from Washington state’s Department of Labor and Industries discovered new safety violations at the company’s Redmond, Washington, site last December, in a visit prompted by worker complaints, according to state inspection records obtained by Reuters under an open records request. An agency spokesperson said that SpaceX can still appeal the decision.

The inspectors concluded the site lacked a “thorough safety program,” adequate communication of work rules, and a system to “correct violations,” the records said. The “near amputation,” as inspectors called it, occurred after a roll of material fell and crushed a worker’s foot.

Managers at SpaceX told the state inspectors that it was a one-time incident and the problem was fixed.

Inspectors, however, found that employees were not required to wear steel-toe shoes, even though the rolls of materials they had to load into a machine had gotten heavier – increasing from about 80 pounds to 300 pounds (36 kg to 136 kg) each. The violation was described as serious given the risk of injury, an agency spokesperson said.

One worker at the site told inspectors that “safety can get overlooked” because the company’s “goal is to make as much as we can in a short amount of time,” according to the records. The injured worker said the machine where the rolls were loaded “had been deliberately set up incorrectly for the purpose of increasing the production rate during the material loading phase.”

The worker, who was not identified in the report, told inspectors that the matter had not been addressed and that safety officials at the company do not “have the reading comprehension nor the overall competency to implement a safety plan at the Redmond site.”

In a separate incident reported less than 24 hours later, an unidentified Redmond employee was hospitalized for a broken ankle after they jumped off a dock during a fire alarm, which inspectors said the company could not have foreseen. SpaceX was not fined as a result.

The Reuters report last year found that worker safety agencies fined the billionaire’s rocket company a total of $50,836 for various violations in the last decade.

SpaceX’s history of injuries and regulatory run-ins underscores the limits of worker-safety regulation. Fines are capped by law and pose little deterrent for major companies, according to experts in US worker safety. Federal and state regulators also suffer from chronic understaffing of inspectors, they said.

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which has paid SpaceX more than $11.8 billion as a private space contractor, did not respond to questions about the matter. The space agency has repeatedly declined to comment on the company’s safety record, saying only that the agency has the option of enforcing contract provisions that require SpaceX to “have a robust and effective safety program and culture.”

Last month, the wife of the worker who is in a coma after his skull was fractured filed a negligence lawsuit against the company. NASA and SpaceX have not commented on that complaint. – Rappler.com