Former NASA Astronaut Jack Fischer won a 2024 Astronaut Rock Star Award this past weekend for leading the Intuitive Machines team that landed an American spacecraft on the moon for the first time since Apollo 17. Odysseus was also the first privately funded lunar lander, and the first spacecraft to touch down in the Moon’s south polar regions.
“It’s so cool to be recognized for contributing to space exploration,” Fischer said. “I may be the astronaut at IM, but putting Odie on the moon was a team effort. We’re just a small private company of dreamers who worked hard to achieve something incredible.”
Jack Fischer spent 136 days on the International Space Station and completed two spacewalks. He’s now VP for production and operations Intuitive Machines.
“It’s as cool as you think it would be,” Fischer told me in a recent TechFirst podcast, referring to what it’s like to go to space. “Light starts coming in, the engine kicks off, you’re in space, you’re floating, you look outside, and there’s this thin blue line of every living thing on the planet that is so dramatic from 250 miles up.”
Intuitive Machines landed Odysseus on the Moon in February of this year, and have since been awarded a NASA contract to develop a new lunar vehicle for astronauts to use on the surface of the moon. The company’s next mission to the moon, IM-2, will be a prospecting mission to explore for ice and other usable materials. It’s currently planned for late 2024.
That craft will land right next to the Shackleton crater, also near the moon’s south pole.
“It is a site that we are fairly confident will have water, ice in the soil,” Fischer says. “We’re bringing a drill with us that drills down about a meter into the soil and has a little mass spectrometer that looks for volatiles in what we dig up.”
The mission will also have two small lunar rovers onboard, and a rocket-powered drone called the Hopper, which will “hop” into a deep permanently shadowed crater to search for ice.
(Ice is an important resource in space, since ice can be used for drinking water, oxygen, rocket fuel, agriculture, cooling systems, and even radiation shielding.)
Fischer says the company is also working on non-cooperative docking of spacecraft that might be out of control or in distress, a sample return mission for Martian rocks delivered to near earth orbit by a larger craft, and Near Space Network Services, a commercial augmentation for the Deep Space Network for better communications.
(Think an internet upgrade for outer space.)
The Astronaut Rock Star awards, organized by the astronaut speaker agency Uniphigood, were timed to coincide with the 55th anniversary of the moon landing in 1969.
The legendary late astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr. also received a legacy award.
