A U.S. company’s 14-foot-tall spacecraft began speeding to the moon, where the vehicle is expected to try to make history by pulling off the first-ever commercial lunar landing.
The lander, called Odysseus and developed by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, isn’t carrying crew, but rather is ferrying scientific and commercial payloads. It was launched at 1:05 a.m. ET Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX rocket and later separated from the upper part of that vehicle to start a roughly 239,000-mile journey, according to a livestream.
The spacecraft had a successful launch and connected to radio communications with the company’s mission operations center in Houston, Intuitive Machines said.
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