IM-2 mission thread - February 26, 2025 and onward

[eeergo]

If we want apples to apples, we should use the Lunar Surveyor missions, adjusted for inflation.  Those were short-duration lunar landers, not multi-year Martian orbiters or Discovery missions to asteroids, comets, and other targets.  Indications are that the average cost of a Lunar Surveyor mission ran somewhat north of $800M in today’s dollars.

I'd tend to wager that comparing a first-ever lunar lander with the full support of the USG during a Keynesian push to beat the rival superpower to land crew on the Moon is quite a different feat than having private ventures base their talent, approaches and knowledge base on the accumulated expertise of the last 5 decades, as well as the computing power developed in the interim, to achieve a similar goal.

Each of the four CLPS missions to date has been a little north of $100M.  The Peregrine, IM-1, and Blue Ghost figures are inclusive of integration and testing, launch, and ops.  The same figure for IM-2 is actually a little less than $50M, but IM-2 included some more tens of millions for a couple instruments/payloads:

Peregrine $108M
IM-1 $118M
Blue Ghost 1 $102M
IM-2 $118M

Total $446M

https://wccftech.com/nasas-payload-costs-for-lunar-lander-jump-by-36-for-astrobotics-peregrine-mission/
https://payloadspace.com/payload-research-the-ultra-low-cost-economics-of-nasas-clps-lunar-program/
https://spacenews.com/fireflys-blue-ghost-1-lands-on-the-moon/
https://spaceflightnow.com/2025/03/07/intuitive-machines-im-2-mission-ends-with-lander-on-its-side-on-the-moon/

Call it $500M for the four CLPS missions launched to date.

Money spent on CLPS missions that were either cancelled in development, cancelled themselves in space, or succeeded in landing, with or without relevant scientific return, has been almost exactly $1B (to be precise, $0.97B) if you include contract modifications and additional tests: https://jatan.space/nasa-clps-moon-missions/

I consider that a valid metric because it represents what you "have to spend" in order to have a minimal chance of ROI (i.e. BG-1).

Also should be noted that figure is probably much less than the actual cost, since the whole point of CLPS is that companies also invest their own resources on development.

So if MRO is your yardstick for “textbook-changing interplanetary probe”, then no, NASA could not have funded two MRO _missions_ at $700M each or $1.4B total for the $500M cost of the four CLPS missions to date.  In fact, NASA could not have even funded one MRO _mission_.  NASA could maybe have built one MRO _spacecraft_ without testing, launch, and ops and hung it in a museum but that would have been about it.

I don't find that to follow from the above, and in fact stating "without testing and launch" misrepresents again the figures I sourced above. MRO's development, testing and launch was around $500M, or half of the whole CLPS program so far, disregarding the private ventures' expenses. Ops costs for CLPS must be very low, given these missions' short foreseen timespans, in any case under a few (Earth) days - compared to the multi-year ops costs for MRO. So yeah, you can fit two MRO-like design-to-launch missions there. Or lots (5-8) of simpler, yet much more reliable and with much higher ROI, classic science probes.

Is CLPS setting a fundamentally much lower cost curve for planetary science missions?  Yes, see above.

Unsubstantiated, as per the above, unless you restrict yourself to comparing a single mission in each case, but fail to account for the probabilistic 70% effective failure rate -during flight or on the ground- demonstrated so far with statistical significance.

CLPS is where COTS was about a decade or so ago after completing its first demonstration missions.  COTS wasn’t going to deliver crew transport to the ISS (that was CCDev) or crewed lunar landers (that’s HLS).  COTS was just unmanned ISS resupply.  But COTS proved the model, achieved a much lower cost curve for human space flight development and operations, and set the stage for those more advanced developments.  Given where it’s at, I’d argue CLPS should be viewed in the same vein.

COTS was indeed very successful, there's no denying that - but at this point I'm tempted to view it as a case study benefitting from a kind of first-mover advantage, and mostly based on the "prodigy child" represented by SpaceX's Falcon 9 v1.0 and Dragon C10x. It was also IMHO exploiting low-hanging fruit in the sense of putting together reasonably unrisky developments that were ripe to exploit under a decisive leadership and tight ship, during exceptionally conductive times led by the public sector (wind down of STS while ISS started its full exploitation phase). So an anomaly of sorts, many of which will not and cannot happen in a short (decades-long) timeframe.

Also, COTS didn't suffer from a 70% failure rate while accumulating costs that would have allowed for traditional development schemes with the same ROI.

CCDev was unarguably less successful, while stakes were even higher, since it wouldn't have been allowed to fail in view of the lack of redundancy for an increasingly untenable dependency on a rapidly degrading "alliance" with Russian providers. It had to work, and every advantage was given to guarantee its succes - yet it had significant cost to deliver a single alternative, however capable, based on many of the developments achieved in COTS, plus just a foreseeable second alternative that has yet to fully prove itself and may never be given the chance. CLPS should be regarded in my view as the 3rd stage in this increasingly disadvantageous model. Since you mention it, I also believe HLS may well be its fourth and last stage, but that's another topic.

[edzieba]

Money spent on CLPS missions that were either cancelled in development, cancelled themselves in space, or succeeded in landing, with or without relevant scientific return, has been almost exactly $1B (to be precise, $0.97B) if you include contract modifications and additional tests: https://jatan.space/nasa-clps-moon-missions/

Maximum contract awards != money spent.
CLPS is milestone payment based (like COTS, CCDev, HLS, etc), payments are not made up-front but incrementally as milestones are achieved. Counting the full contract award of missions that have not flown or will not be flown as 'money spent' is disingenuous at best.

[Robotbeat]

so the entire CLPS program so far has been just half the $2B cost overrun for SLS ML-2? https://spacenews.com/nasas-inspector-general-predicts-continued-cost-growth-for-sls-mobile-launch-platform/

[Robotbeat]

CLPS should be seen as industrial policy, like an incubator program for lunar development or, at very least, for new lander contractors for NASA. Don’t want to forever be reliant on Lockheed Martin… or even SpaceX for that matter. It’s in the national interest to have competition here.

[eeergo]

Money spent on CLPS missions that were either cancelled in development, cancelled themselves in space, or succeeded in landing, with or without relevant scientific return, has been almost exactly $1B (to be precise, $0.97B) if you include contract modifications and additional tests: https://jatan.space/nasa-clps-moon-missions/

Maximum contract awards != money spent.
CLPS is milestone payment based (like COTS, CCDev, HLS, etc), payments are not made up-front but incrementally as milestones are achieved. Counting the full contract award of missions that have not flown or will not be flown as 'money spent' is disingenuous at best.

Most of the payments in CLPS missions are linked to pre-landing milestones, or extremely lax post-landing criteria. So the difference, in the case of CLPS, is mostly a rounding error. Regarding the missions that were cancelled before flight, I see them as valid in the total count as any other failed test forcing a subsystem redesign in a particular mission, or as Apollo I in the Apollo program. If you really want to exclude them, the whole of Masten's contract (a significant part of which was executed and paid for) was $76 - so again, a rounding error in the $1B figure.

[VSECOTSPE]

I'd tend to wager that comparing a first-ever lunar lander with the full support of the USG during a Keynesian push to beat the rival superpower to land crew on the Moon is quite a different feat than having private ventures base their talent, approaches and knowledge base on the accumulated expertise of the last 5 decades, as well as the computing power developed in the interim, to achieve a similar goal.

Which is part of the point — after a half-century, we should be able to put landers on the Moon for a fraction of what it cost during the Apollo era.  And CLPS shows that to be true.

Money spent on CLPS missions that were either cancelled in development, cancelled themselves in space, or succeeded in landing, with or without relevant scientific return, has been almost exactly $1B (to be precise, $0.97B) if you include contract modifications and additional tests: https://jatan.space/nasa-clps-moon-missions/

I don’t see the $970M.  Missions 1-6, including the cancelled Masten and Griffin landers, total $693M.

MRO's development, testing and launch was around $500M

MRO is an apples/oranges yardstick.  It’s a multi-year martian orbiter, not a multi-week lunar lander.  One can see that in the contortions you’re going through to make the comparison.  You have to omit MRO’s operations — which is the whole point of any space science mission — to get to a number you like.  So yeah, NASA could build another MRO, launch it through Martian C3, and then turn it off and fire the operations team for the cost of CLPS missions 1-6.

Better to use Lunar Surveyor where the target, mission type, and mission duration are apples/apples.

Unsubstantiated, as per the above,

It’s substantiated in the apples/apples comparison to Lunar Surveyor.  The comparison to MRO is nonsensical apples/oranges since you have to turn off MRO after it launches.

The other comparison that might kinda/sorta be crabapples to Red Delicious would be looking at what it would take to do a CLPS lander under the PI-led model of the Discovery Program.  One of the first Discovery missions was Lunar Prospector, launched in 1998 for $63M or ~$125M in today’s dollars.  It’s still an imperfect comparison of long-duration orbiter to short-duration lander.  But with Lunar Prospector, you can maybe argue that the Discovery Program could hypothetically do CLPS landers at CLPS costs.  I’d argue probably not given the mission risk profile of landers compared to orbiters.  Knowing what the independent review team at LaRC subjects Discovery proposals to in order to ensure mission success, I doubt a first-off lunar lander would come through that process that’s not multiple hundreds of millions of dollars.  And no one(s) is proposing multiple lunar landers to the Discovery AO process, anyway.  But Lunar Prospector at least offers half a hypothetical leg to stand on if someone wants to make a case against CLPS.

As an aside, there was another lunar Discovery mission called GRAIL.  It approached a half-billion in total cost, but it was also a high-precision, multi-spacecraft mission where the spacecraft themselves were practically the instrument.   I’d say it’s as apples/oranges as MRO.

At the end of the day, the future of CLPS won’t be up to us.  Either the NRC’s planetary decadal surveys and mid-term reviews will continue to endorse CLPS or not.  Maybe in 2028 or 2033, they’ll look at the failure/cancellation rate and say “nope, not worth it”.  Or maybe they’ll see the science from instruments like LISTER, LMS, and LEXI on Blue Ghost 1 and other landers and say “more like that, please”.  Right now, as of the 2023 decadal, they’d like to see the model tried at other destinations, specifically Mars and asteroids.  As BlackStar pointed out elsewhere here, CLPS landers may need to grow in capability, not just reliability, in order to satisfy NRC surveys/reviews.

Of course, some exogenous budget crunch or priority could come along that has nothing to do with CLPS or planetary science and wipe out the program out.  But that’s always an annual risk in our federal budget system.

Also, COTS didn't suffer from a 70% failure rate while accumulating costs that would have allowed for traditional development schemes with the same ROI.

COTS had a 33% failure rate.  Rocketplane/Kistler had to be cancelled when they couldn’t meet milestones and were replaced by OSC (now NG).

CLPS should be regarded in my view as the 3rd stage in this increasingly disadvantageous model. Since you mention it, I also believe HLS may well be its fourth and last stage, but that's another topic.

After the X-33/34, OSP/SLI, and Columbia debacles, I developed what became the COTS model at OMB, got that program started at NASA, and served as the first PE for COTS.  So I’m biased. 

That said, what’s the alternative model for human space flight programs?  Uncompeted, sole-sourced purchases of updated Shuttle systems that no one else uses?  That has not worked out for SLS, which is grossly expensive compared to private sector alternatives and can’t manage even an Apollo-era launch rate.  Traditional, Apollo-era, NASA-led and -managed design?  That has not worked out on Orion, where 20+ years after program start, the capsule still doesn’t have a proven heat shield.  Ground systems?  Nope, as pointed out upthread, traditional NASA human space flight program management can’t even contract for a launch tower these days without incurring overruns that cost many multiples of a Discovery or New Frontiers mission.

Folks can be as negative on the COTS model as they want.  (I heard it all years ago from Griffin, Horowitz, appropriators, and worse.)  But the reality is that without COTS/CRS and CCDev/CC, NASA would have no domestic access to ISS .  And without HLS, Artemis could not have afforded a lunar lander for its crews.  However imperfect, the COTS model has worked where the old HSF program model has utterly failed, repeatedly.  I’m open to a third model for HSF programs, if it’s exists.  But the old ways — ex-astronaut and ex-mission ops managers with no development experience and conflicts of interest, lack of almost any competition, insanely detailed and ever-changing technical and procurement requirements, no or poor review milestones without off-ramps and back-ups, absent cost knowledge and controls, reliance on enormous military primes for whom these programs are not priorities — don’t work anymore.  Until there’s a third model, as NASA HSF figured out after Orion/SLS and as ESA and China are learning, it’s basically the COTS model or nothing.  The old ways doom HSF programs to failure or obsolesence.

Bringing this back to NASA science, I think the COTS model should be tried where it makes sense.  For most of what NASA science does — bespoke PI (this is a great model) and flagship (needs work, probably some injection of competition) missions and space telescopes — the COTS model does not make sense, at all.  But the COTS model in its CLPS incarnation seems to offer a lower cost and more frequent means of routine data gathering in the inner solar system.  For now, at least, the relevant decadal agrees with me.

FWIW...

[JEF_300]

This is the IM-2 thread, not the general CLPS thread. Go argue about program costs over there.

Here, on this thread, I only see one major question remaining; what went wrong?

To that end, here are another set of images from LRO, though with a much more oblique angle.
https://www.lroc.asu.edu/images/1408

It's noted in the caption of the second image that the crater it's in is about 20 meters in diameter.

Anyone know what direction it would've been coming in from? The terrain to the north of the landing site does look pretty rough and worth avoiding.

[Phil Stooke]

I don't have specific knowledge but the orbit is near-polar and you would not want to fly south over the farside, then zip round the limb and land at Mons Mouton, because most of your descent would be out of comm. You would want to fly south over the nearside and have comm all the way to landing.

[catdlr]

New Images Show The Athena Lunar Lander In A Crater

Mar 11, 2025
It's now been a few days since the IM-2 Athena lander made contact with the Moon and new images were just released from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. With these we can actually see the lander inside a small crater along with the surrounding terrain.

This helps give an idea of what could've gone wrong during the touchdown attempt, leading to a broken landing leg and the eventual loss of power.

[Robotbeat]

This is the IM-2 thread, not the general CLPS thread. Go argue about program costs over there.

Here, on this thread, I only see one major question remaining; what went wrong?

To that end, here are another set of images from LRO, though with a much more oblique angle.
https://www.lroc.asu.edu/images/1408

It's noted in the caption of the second image that the crater it's in is about 20 meters in diameter.

Anyone know what direction it would've been coming in from? The terrain to the north of the landing site does look pretty rough and worth avoiding.

Yeah, I’d also like to know.

[Phil Stooke]

it came in from the north - see my previous post.  There is a hint of a bright line along that track just before the touchdown, probably made by the exhaust plume.

[illectro]

Yes the light area matches the direction from which the lander approached.
Also, Yaoki team released all their raw images and now our image of the broken leg clearly shows it, and the debris nearby is one of the 'stickers' from the footpads.

[Phil Stooke]

We can do better than that. This is a composite of several stacks of images processed with different methods and combined. Look at the object right of centre. It's a disk from the bottom of the adjacent footpad which has fallen off and curled up. The image on it is outline maps of Arizona and Maryland plus some text, visible in the pre-encapsulation images. Each footpad had a different image on it.

[Svetoslav]

Latest update:

https://www.intuitivemachines.com/post/im-2-the-southernmost-step-in-human-exploration

360 degree panorama here:

[sdsds]

Presumably the phase of the Earth indicates when the panorama was taken.

[illectro]

Presumably the phase of the Earth indicates when the panorama was taken.

Given that it was flying and not on its side we can constrain the image time without looking at the phase of the earth!

[JEF_300]

I'm shocked no one has put in the latest Scott Manley video yet!



It consolidates much of the information from this thread, as well as other sources, and a bit of his own work. Evidence strongly suggests that the lander had significant, ~10 m/s, lateral velocity when landing.

[ccdengr]

Evidence strongly suggests that the lander had significant, ~10 m/s, lateral velocity when landing.

Agreed.

Does anyone know if IM is using this tech from Advanced Navigation, or did this not pan out?  Whatever they are using for altimetry and surface-rel velocity doesn't seem to be working very well.  https://www.advancednavigation.com/case-studies/intuitive-machines-looks-to-advanced-navigation-laser-velocity-and-ranging-technology-for-autonomous-commercial-lunar-landings/

[catdlr]

I'm shocked no one has put in the latest Scott Manley video yet!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ISZTTEtHcTg

It consolidates much of the information from this thread, as well as other sources, and a bit of his own work. Evidence strongly suggests that the lander had significant, ~10 m/s, lateral velocity when landing.

It's been rough for me with my caregiving responsibilities.  That came out while I was trying to catch up on sleep.  I just got up.
 Thanks for posting.

[brussell]

no explanations yet about long hovering at 5000 meters and about negative altitudes in telemetries?

The troublesome laser altimeters (one inhibited by interlock, the other very noisy) were discussed at length in yesterday's news conference, and likely contributed to the wild fluctuations we were seeing.  You can watch that presser here.

Does anybody know which specific laser altimeters were these, like the model?