A spacecraft named Odysseus prepares to launch again to the moon

Another month, another day, another attempt at the moon.

A robotic lunar lander will be launched in the early hours of Thursday, one day after a technical glitch postponed the first launch attempt. If all goes well, it will be the first American spacecraft to touch down gently on the moon's surface since the Apollo 17 moon landing in 1972.

It is also the latest private attempt to send spacecraft to the moon. Previous attempts have all ended in failure. But the company responsible for the latest effort, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, is optimistic.

“I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to land softly on the moon,” said Stephen Altemus, president and CEO of Intuitive Machines. “We have done the tests. We tested and tested and tested. As much testing as we could do.”

When is the launch and how can I watch?

The Intuitive Machines lander, named Odysseus, will launch Wednesday at 1:05 a.m. Eastern Time on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The weather is expected to be favorable, with a 10 percent chance of conditions hindering the launch.

SpaceX And NASA will stream coverage of the launch beginning at 12:20 a.m. Eastern Time.

SpaceX announced late Tuesday that it would postpone a Wednesday morning launch attempt. The company said in a post on the

If another technical problem or bad weather delays the launch, SpaceX can try again on Friday.

When and where is the landing?

If the launch takes place this week, the landing will take place on February 22 near a crater called Malapert A. (Malapert A is a satellite crater of the larger Malapert crater, named after Charles Malapert, a 17th-century Belgian astronomer.)

Odysseus will enter orbit around the moon approximately 24 hours before the landing attempt.

The landing site, about 300 kilometers from the south pole on the moon's near side, is relatively flat, an easier location for a spacecraft to land. No American spacecraft has ever landed on the moon's south pole, which is a focus of many space agencies and companies because it may be rich in frozen water.

How big is the spacecraft?

Intuitive Machines calls its spacecraft design Nova-C and named this particular lander Odysseus. It is a hexagonal cylinder with six landing legs, approximately 4 meters high and 1.5 meters wide. Intuitive Machines points out that the lander's body is about the size of an old British telephone box – that is, like the Tardis in the sci-fi TV show 'Doctor Who'.

At launch, the lander, with a full charge of propellant, weighs approximately 4,200 pounds.

What goes to the moon?

NASA is the primary customer for the Intuitive Machines flight; it pays the company $118 million to deliver its cargoes. NASA also spent another $11 million to develop and build the six instruments on the flight:

• A laser retroreflector array to reflect back laser beams fired from Earth.

• A LIDAR instrument that accurately measures the spacecraft's altitude and speed as it descends to the moon's surface.

• A stereo camera that captures video of the dust plume thrown up by the lander's engines during landing.

• A low-frequency radio receiver to measure the effects of charged particles near the moon's surface on radio signals.

• A beacon, Lunar Node-1, to demonstrate an autonomous navigation system.

• An instrument in the fuel tank that uses radio waves to measure how much fuel is left in the tank.

The lander also carries a few other payloads, including a camera built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida; a precursor instrument for a future lunar telescope; and an art project by Jeff Koons.

Wasn't there just another American spacecraft headed to the moon?

On January 8, Astrobotic Technology sent its Peregrine lander to the moon. But a failure in the propulsion system shortly after launch prevented any possibility of landing. Ten days later, as Peregrine swung back to Earth, it burned up in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.

Both Odysseus and Peregrine are part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS. The goal of the program is to use commercial companies to send experiments to the moon instead of NASA building and operating its own lunar landers.

“We've always viewed these first CLPS deliveries as something of a learning experience,” Joel Kearns, the deputy assistant administrator for exploration at NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during a news conference Tuesday.

The space agency hopes this approach will be much cheaper, allowing it to fly more frequent missions as it prepares to send astronauts back to the moon as part of its Artemis program.