Talking Space

Talking Space returns after a hiatus to discuss the landing attempts by the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. First a successful soft landing of the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost 1 mission on the plans of Mare Crisium.  Then a much more perilous landing attempt for the Intuitive Machines "Athena" lander, trying to land its suite of science and technology demonstrations closer to the Lunar South Pole than any other mission to date, with some mixed results. We also mention that Japan's ispace is set to try a lunar landing on 6 June.   We then focused on the Expedition 72 / 73 handover at the International Space Station and took one more look at the Crew-9 Mission's saga in the mainstream press with a reminder, no Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were never stuck on the ISS. Our Mark Ratterman also reminds all that the NASA Spinoff catalog for 2025 is available for download. If at first, you don't succeed... try, try again out at Boca Chica Texas for the SpaceX Starship with Integrated Flight Test 8.