Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Image credit: Intuitive Machines

The Athena Moon lander is now at Cape Canaveral, Florida, targeted for a four-day launch window that opens no earlier than February 26.

Built by Houston, Texas-based Intuitive Machines, the spacecraft is the second of four manifested lunar missions as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

Payload customers

The factory-equipped Athena is outfitted with a set of payloads, designed to validate resource prospecting, mobility, and communications infrastructure in the Moon’s Mons Mouton region, one of nine potential Artemis III landing sites.

Nine candidate landing regions for NASA’s Artemis III mission The background image of the lunar South Pole terrain within the nine regions is a mosaic of LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) WAC (Wide Angle Camera) images.
Image credit: NASA

Payload customers are: NASA, Lonestar Data Holdings, Columbia Sportswear, Nokia, Lunar Outpost, Puli Space, Dymon Co. Ltd., German Aerospace Center.

Broader efforts

Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus, pointed out in a press statement: “This commitment to flying missions reinforces our broader efforts of developing a heavy cargo lander, establishing a lunar data relay satellite constellation, and providing sustainable infrastructure services at the Moon to enable further exploration of the solar system.”

Intuitive Machines (IM-2), a Nova-C lunar lander dubbed Athena is being prepared for sendoff to the moon’s south pole. Onboard the lander is the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1), a NASA experiment designed to search for water ice on the moon.
Image credit: Intuitive Machines

Athena will be lofted by a SpaceX Falcon-9 booster with backup launch opportunities depending on the “lunar blackout window” and other factors, Intuitive Machines adds.

Athena is to be joined near-term with another Moonbound spacecraft, the Lunar Trailblazer as a rideshare probe. Lunar Trailblazer is a Caltech-led orbiter dedicated to pinpointing water ice deposits on the Moon.