A cursed rocket took off on February 27th of last year. And it left us with a mystery that had gone unsolved . . . until now.
The rocket was a SpaceX Falcon 9. It launched from Florida and did what it was supposed to do. The problems arrived via the four payloads tucked inside of the rocket’s fairing. They were all meant to accomplish spectacular feats, although the space gods had other plans.
The most attention-grabbing payload was the Nova-C lunar lander from Intuitive Machines. It reached the moon a few days after launch but ended up on its side. The lander ran out of power a day later, and its mission ended.
NASA sent up a lunar craft of its own - the Lunar Trailblazer. It had been designed to orbit the moon and find and map the location of water on its surface. NASA, though, lost contact with the machine not long after launch and hasn’t been able to talk with it since.
AstroForge, the asteroid mining start-up, suffered a similar fate with its Odin demonstration craft. About a day after launch, the company lost contact with its machine. The last messages received from Odin came when it was 200,000km from Earth. The company tried to find solace in this accomplishment, saying that no private company had ever communicated with a craft that had traveled so far into space.
What AstroForge didn’t know at the time was that the communication record had already been broken by the fourth payload at the heart of our tale. This was Epic Aerospace’s Chimera GEO-1 – an orbital transfer vehicle (aka a space tug) attached to a satellite from an undisclosed company.
Unlike the other organizations with payloads on that Falcon 9, Epic has been quiet about the fate of its machine. Now, however, the company’s founder and CEO Ignacio Belieres Montero has come to Core Memory with a rather startling revelation. Chimera GEO-1 is 53 million kilometers from Earth . . . and it’s possibly alive . . . and Epic is hoping to try and bring it back.
The trick is that Epic will need aid from some mighty forces if it’s to pull off this daring and unprecedented feat.
Montero with his baby
MONTERO IS in his late 20s and looks it. He’s fresh-faced with cheeks that push up high when he speaks and that punctuate the enthusiasm behind his words.
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