Intuitive Machines lands on moon in nail-biting descent of private Odysseus lander, a 1st for US since 1972
Odysseus is the first private spacecraft ever to land softly on Earth's nearest neighbor.
After a nail-biting descent and a tense silence from the lunar surface, the United States is back on the moon.
Odysseus, a robotic lander built by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines, touched down near the lunar south pole this evening (Feb. 22).
It was a landmark moment for space exploration: No private spacecraft had ever soft-landed on the moon before, and an American vehicle hadn't hit the gray dirt softly since NASA's crewed Apollo 17 lander did so in December 1972.
"What a triumph! Odysseus has taken the moon," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a video message the agency aired just after confirmation of a successful touchdown. "This feat is a giant leap forward for all of humanity. Stay tuned!"
In December 2017, then-President Donald Trump ordered NASA to return astronauts to the moon in the relatively near future. This directive gave rise to a broad and ambitious program called Artemis, which aims to establish a long-term, sustainable human presence on and around the moon by the end of the 2020s — and to use the knowledge gained in doing so to help get astronauts to Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s.
NASA plans to set up one or more Artemis bases in the moon's southern polar region, which is thought to harbor lots of water ice. Before sending astronauts there, however, the agency wants to collect more data about this little-explored area — to help determine, for example, just how much water it contains and how easy this crucial resource is to access.
So NASA established another program called CLPS ("Commercial Lunar Payload Services"), which books rides for agency science instruments on robotic moon landers built by American companies.
"The goal here is for us to investigate the moon in preparation for Artemis, and really to do business differently for NASA," Sue Lederer, CLPS project scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston, said during a press conference on Feb. 12. "One of our main goals is to make sure that we develop a lunar economy."
The 14-foot-tall (4.3 meters) Odysseus, which was built by Houston company Intuitive Machines, apparently settled on its side during its historic touchdown yesterday (Feb. 22), mission team members said. But don't panic — the pioneering spacecraft is still very much alive.
"So far, we have quite a bit of operational capability even though we're tipped over," Intuitive Machines CEO and co-founder Steve Altemus said during a press briefing today (Feb. 23).
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