A spacecraft built and run by the Texas-based business Intuitive Machines made a historic landing on Thursday, close to the moon’s south pole. This was the first time the United States has set foot on the lunar surface in more than 50 years and the first landing carried out by the private sector.
NASA, which equipped the vehicle with a number of research instruments, hailed the landing as a major step toward its goal of deploying a fleet of private spacecraft for lunar exploration missions. The goal of these missions is to go before the scheduled astronaut return to the moon later this decade.
Even though everyone was celebrating the landing, there were early communication problems that raised questions about possible problems or impediments that might have affected the vehicle’s operation.
Odysseus, the unmanned robot lander, descended at roughly 6:23 p.m. EST (0023 WAT), as both the business and NASA revealed during a joint webcast from the mission operations center of Intuitive Machines in Houston.
The landing signaled the end of a tense final approach and descent during which ground engineers had to apply an unproven remedy at the last minute due to a problem with the spacecraft’s autonomous navigation system.
It took some time to get in touch with the spacecraft again and find out its status after a predicted radio blackout, some 239,000 miles (384,000 km) from Earth. When communication was established again, the signal was weak, indicating that the touchdown was successful but initially leaving mission control unsure of the exact state and direction of the vehicle.
The safe landing on Thursday was the first controlled descent of an American spacecraft to the lunar surface since NASA’s final crewed moon mission, Apollo 17, which included astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, came down in 1972.