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A commercial spaceflight has successfully landed on the Moon for the first time, ushering in a new era of private lunar exploration.
After an eight-day flight, the unmanned Odysseus lander from US-based Intuitive Machines landed safely on the lunar surface on Thursday, near its target, the Malapert A crater near the Moon’s south pole.
The descent was full of last-minute suspense as mission control lost contact with the lander just as it reached the surface. However, about 15 minutes after the scheduled landing time, a faint signal was finally received and mission director and chief technology officer Tim Crain announced: “Odysseus has found a new home.”
The mission marks the United States’ successful return to lunar exploration for the first time in more than 50 years, following the end of the Apollo program in 1972. It is a major milestone in NASA’s plans to send humans to the pole lunar south in 2026, relying on private businesses to help reduce the costs of services such as transportation, navigation and communications.
Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, said: “The United States is back on the Moon. Today for the first time. . . a commercial company, an American company, launched and conducted the trip up there. This demonstrates the power and promise of NASA’s commercial partnerships. What a triumph!”
NASA has said creating a commercially viable lunar economy will be vital to its ambition of a permanent human base on the Moon and eventually Mars.
Thomas Zurbuchen, a professor of space sciences at ETH Zurich who managed NASA’s science missions until 2022, said the landing “changes the entire paradigm of planetary exploration. Until now everything has been done by governments. With companies we can do it much more economically.”
The safe landing of Odysseus was greeted with enthusiasm at Intuitive’s mission control center in Houston, Texas. In the last few hours the lander was forced to make an extra orbit around the Moon because its laser navigation system was not working properly and engineers were forced to use instruments from a NASA payload on board.
NASA paid Intuitive $118 million to carry six scientific payloads, including instruments to observe space weather from the Moon and a radio beacon to aid navigation. The company also carried six commercial packages, including mini-sculptures by artist Jeff Koons, a camera to record the moon landing and a lunar archive.
The solar-powered lander will carry out experiments near the lunar south pole and is expected to operate for about 14 days in sunlight. It is the first of three Intuitive Machines missions planned by NASA in preparation for the agency’s Artemis missions to the lunar south pole.
The region is rich in resources such as frozen water, which could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen to help support a permanent human presence on the Moon. Last year, India became the first country to land a spacecraft in the South Pole region.
Intuitive’s soft landing comes just over a year after the company entered the market through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company.
Stephen Altemus, co-founder and chief executive, told the Financial Times that the company aims to provide a range of lunar services from communications to navigation and even energy production.
“We will have the most data on the Moon, the most comprehensive,” he said. “You take that first step and then a whole series of unexpected and expected activities [follow] from that.”
Shares of Intuitive Machines, which had fallen from their 2023 trading debut of $10.03 to $2.32 at the start of the year, have risen sharply in recent weeks as the mission hit milestones toward its launch on a Falcon 9 rocket built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. They closed at $8.28 on Thursday, down 11%.
An attempted moon landing by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology failed last month when problems with the spacecraft’s propulsion system caused a major fuel leak soon after its launch.
An uncrewed Japanese rover landed on the Moon in January, but an upside-down landing made it difficult to generate solar power, limiting its ability to explore the lunar surface.