Another month, another try at the moon .
SpaceX announced the postponement Tuesday night of the scheduled launch of a private robotic lunar lander.
The spacecraft, built by Intuitive Machines of Houston, is on top of the rocket on the launchpad. Weather conditions were favorable but a technical issue led to the delay of its flight by at least a day. The next attempt was Wednesday after press time.
If all goes well then, it will set up the first American spacecraft to land softly on the moon’s surface since the Apollo 17 moon landing in 1972. It will also be the latest private effort to send a spacecraft to the moon.
The Intuitive Machines lander, named Odysseus, was scheduled to launch Wednesday at 7:57 p.m. on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
In a post late Tuesday on X, formerly Twitter, SpaceX said the temperature of methane fuel for the lander was “off-nominal.”
If the launch occurs this week, the landing will be Feb. 22 near a crater named Malapert A.
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