Biography | Kam Ghaffarian — The Same Pad, Two Years Later, When Odysseus Left for the Moon

At 1:05 a.m. Eastern on 15 February 2024, another Falcon 9 left Launch Complex 39A.

In the fairing was Odysseus, a Nova-C lander built by Intuitive Machines of Houston.

NASA's launch note, timed to the minute, called it a Commercial Lunar Payload Services flight under Artemis.

Ghaffarian co-founded Intuitive Machines in 2013 with Stephen Altemus and Tim Crain.

He chairs the board of the Nasdaq-listed company.

Odysseus reached the lunar surface on 22 February 2024 at 23:23:53 UTC, near Malapert A in the south polar highlands, about 80.13 degrees south.

It tipped after touchdown.

Instruments kept working.

NASA and the company treated the flight as the first American soft landing on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the first by a commercial lander.

Contact ended on 29 February as the lunar night arrived.

The landing site is on the Moon.

The place a visitor can stand is this pad, the same 39A that flew Ax-1 two years earlier.

That is not a coincidence of real estate.

Ghaffarian's two crew-and-cargo companies both bought rides from SpaceX at the NASA-owned pad.

The 1969 landing he watched as an eleven-year-old in Isfahan is the reason the 2024 flight exists.

The hardware, and the pad, are American.

Photo: NASA / Kim Shiflett, public domain, KSC-20240215-PH-KLS01_0020, IM-1 liftoff from 39A.