Wednesday’s Stacked SpaceX Launch Is Sending Groundbreaking Science to the Moon and Beyond

Should Wednesday’s launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center proceed as planned, it’s gonna be carrying a buttload of science with it.

The rocket will be carrying not one, not two, but three important payloads, including a satellite set to orbit the Moon, a privately operated lunar lander, and a spacecraft that could pave the way for asteroid mining. It’s also launching an unidentified 16U satellite, managed by Exolaunch, that’ll park itself in geostationary Earth orbit.

While the mission’s launch window opens on February 26, with blastoff ideally occurring at 7:17 p.m. ET, these types of things can get delayed in a hurry if conditions aren’t optimal. NASA will be livestreaming the launch on its website. Alternately, you can watch it at the livestreams below, courtesy of NASA Spaceflight.

After decades of largely being ignored, the Moon has become an object of increased fascination, and two items on the manifest could provide data that contributes to the goal of building crewed bases on the lunar surface. That includes a Nova-C lander, dubbed Athena, built by Intuitive Machines for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

In February 2024, Intuitive Machines became the first private company to successfully land on the Moon, though there was a slight snafu. The company’s Odysseus ended up getting one of its legs caught, causing it to tumble on its side. Like Odysseus, Athena is set to land on the Moon’s South Pole region, specifically an area called Mons Mouton. The lander is equipped with a drill and mass spectrometer, which it will use—if all goes well—to search for and measure chemical components like water, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus that could support future crewed exploration of the Moon.

Hitching a ride on the lander will be Grace, a Micro-Nova robot designed to hop in and out of a permanently shadowed crater. While inside the crater, Grace will search for water and snap a few photos.

Also heading to the Moon is NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer, a smallish satellite designed to map the distribution of water across the lunar surface. The mission aims to solve the mystery of the Moon’s water cycle, while also answering questions about the form, amount, and distribution of lunar water.

Another spacecraft will zoom towards the Moon, but it won’t be stopping there. Astroforge, founded in 2022, is seeking to become the first company to mine asteroids for precious minerals. In 2023, it launched its first mission, a satellite that was supposed to vaporize and sort pre-loaded faux-asteroid materials. The mission didn’t do so well, as the company struggled to communicate with the spacecraft and had issues deploying its solar array. For this follow-up mission, launching Wednesday, the company is decidedly more ambitious.

If successful, Astroforge’s Odin spacecraft will set a record as the farthest-traveling privately built vessel in history. Odin’s flight plan calls for it to complete a five-day journey towards the Moon, using its gravity to propel itself towards an asteroid called 2022 OB5, a candidate for future mining due to its possible metallic composition.

It’s not clear when Odin might reach the asteroid. “This objective is going to take much longer to achieve and therefore has a far lower likelihood of success,” CEO Matt Gialich said in a statement.

Gialich seemed to be tempering expectations ahead of launch, saying that the company is “taking exceptional risks on this mission, more risks than most companies would be willing to accept.”

“If this mission fails, the fault lies with me alone,” he added. “I was involved in the intimate details of every trade-off we made—and we made a lot.”

If all goes well, in several decades time you just might think of this launch as a turning point, when you’re sitting in your Moon base living room, admiring your watch made from asteroid-mined platinum.