The February 22 landing of Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus is the first step in building a lunar economy. It will be years before people live on the Moon and even longer before tourism becomes possible. However, the landing of Odysseus signals the arrival of a new kind of operator on the Moon. Now, commercial operators need to be taken into account along with the explorers and the would -be astropolitical territory markers.
The government driven market
Hauling payloads for governments will be an important part of the new lunar economy for some time to come. There were 12 different payloads on the lander; six of them were sent up for NASA. Moreover, the bulk of the revenue came from NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which funded much of the lander’s development.
CLPS envisions a series of uncrewed lander missions to demonstrate a variety of technologies, explore the Moon, and build out basic infrastructure. For example, the next mission by Intuitive Machines, called IM-2, will deliver a cis-lunar telecommunications satellite. This satellite will begin to take care of one of the big bottlenecks of lunar operations, namely communicating with Earth, especially for instruments on the far side of the Moon.
The commercial payload on Odysseus
The commercial payload on Odysseus
While government contracts will provide the overwhelming majority of orders at the beginning, companies have already begun sending payloads to the Moon. The ill-fated Astrobotics Peregrin, for example, carried commercial payloads including parcels for DHL and ashes of cremated people, including those of beloved Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, his wife Majel, and Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura in Star Trek (The Original Series). Instead of finding a final resting place on the Moon, the whole spacecraft burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.
New use cases involving the Moon are being brought out, but unlike the consumer CLPS items from the Peregrine mission, those on Odessey tend to have a very different function.
As we pointed out in our article on the landing itself, Odysseus brought a variety of commercial products that are related to future projects, such as thermal coatings, namely:
- Material for lining spacecraft from Columbia Sportswear;
- data archives on the lander from two organizations,
- material for lining spacecraft from Columbia Sportswear;
“data” archives on the lander from two organizations.
The International Lunar Observatory Association flew two small astronomical cameras.
Artist Jeff Koons provided an artwork called “Moon Phases” installed on the lander.
EagleCam, from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University students. The students planned on Odysseus releasing the camera on its descent and having the camera photograph the lander as it lands. Unfortunately, that project failed.
As business cases are developed, there will be a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built. The embryonic lunar economy may still need vital government support, but even as it gets built out, there will be plenty of opportunity.
