In a crater near the lunar south pole, in a region where humans might one day live and work, a spacecraft named Odysseus became the first privately operated vehicle to land on the moon on Thursday night.
Kicking up a plume of dust, it settled just outside the rim of Malapart A, a crater 300km (186 miles) from the south pole, at 5.24pm central time (11.24pm GMT), fulfilling its Latin mission motto Adtiga Planitia lunae — “I will reach the plains of the moon.”
The successful touchdown of Intuitive Machines’ robotic lander represented a breakthrough for the commercial space sector and a milestone in opening up the lunar economy, coming six weeks after a mission by a separate company, Astrobotic, was lost to a malfunction.
Bill Nelson, the head of Nasa, called it a “new adventure in science, innovation and American leadership in space … a giant leap for all of humanity”.
It also followed some eleventh-hour technical issues that necessitated sending Odysseus on one more lunar orbit, nudging the landing to a later than expected time, while engineers uploaded a software patch.
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The problem crippled the spacecraft’s laser rangefinders — sensors critical to final navigation, guidance and hazard avoidance during descent. Engineers switched to Nasa’s on-board doppler lidar remote sensor system instead.
“Odysseus has found its new home,” announced Dr Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines’ co-founder and chief technology officer, after a nailbiting wait for news from the spacecraft amid a communications outage.
“We can confirm without a doubt our equipment is on the surface of the moon and we are transmitting. Congratulations IM-1 team,” he added. Three hours after the landing, Intuitive Machines confirmed that the lander was upright, in good health and downlinking data.
Odysseus — also known as the Nova-C lander — was launched from Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on February 15, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Whereas Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander developed technical issues hours into its fateful journey last month, Intuitive Machines moved Odysseus through a series of instrument checks and manoeuvres with apparent ease during its seven-day journey to the moon before the one last-minute hitch.
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The landing would be Odysseus’s “hardest challenge yet”, flight controllers had warned — and the mission overall, from launch to landing, required precision navigation and control akin to hitting a golf ball in New York and scoring a hole-in-one in Los Angeles.
Relying on sensors that acted like an inner ear and laser technology to recognise the local geography and guide itself to a safe touchdown, Odysseus’s final descent was fully autonomous.
It was the first US spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon since the Apollo 17 crewed mission in 1972.
Selfies snapped by the spacecraft, which is 4.3 metres (14ft) tall and 1.6 metres (5.2ft) wide, showed itself set against the blue backdrop of Earth and sailing above the pockmarked lunar landscape.
Touchdown was in the southern highlands. The region is rich in water ice – a critical future resource as Nasa pursues its goal of establishing a sustained human presence on the moon as a stepping-stone on its path to Mars. Water provides not only life support but components for rocket fuel.
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The IM-1 mission is part of Nasa’s $2.6 billion Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme, under which the space agency has partnered with American industry to deliver science instruments to the surface and test new technologies ahead of its crewed Artemis missions.
“These daring moon deliveries will not only conduct new science at the moon, but they are supporting a growing commercial space economy while showing the strength of American technology and innovation,’” said Bill Nelson, the head of Nasa.
Nasa’s Artemis II mission, expected no earlier than September 2025, will be a 10-day test voyage around the moon with four astronauts on board – the first time Nasa’s SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft will have flown with crew.
Artemis III, targeted for late 2026 but likely to slip to 2027, is planned to put humans on the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt printed the last human footsteps in the lunar dust in 1972.
