U.S. spacecraft lands on the moon for the first time in over 50 years

The U.S. company Intuitive Machines has made a historic landing on the moon today, Friday February 23. Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander, launched earlier this month, touched down on moon’s surface at 6:23 p.m. ET, marking the U.S.’s first lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972 and the first ever landing on the moon by a commercial entity.

The Odysseus lander was part of NASA’s CLPS program, which provides contracts to companies for lunar services, and the lander carries a number of NASA scientific instruments. It has landed on the moon’s south pole, which is an area of particular scientific interest as it hosts water ice and is the region where NASA plans to land astronauts under its Artemis program.

The landing’s success was hailed by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who said in an announcement: “On the eight day of a quarter million mile voyage, a voyage along the great cosmic bridge from the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center to the target of the south pole of the moon, a commercial lander named Odysseus, powered by a company called Intuitive Machines, launched upon a SpaceX rocket carrying a bounty of NASA scientific instruments, and bearing the dream of a new adventure. A new adventure in science, innovation, and American leadership in space. Well, all of that aced the landing of a lifetime.

“Today, for the first time in more than half a century, the U.S. has returned to the moon.”

Coverage of the landing was livestreamed by Intuitive Machines, including a nail-biting few minutes after the expected landing time when it took some time to establish communications with the lander. The lander works somewhat autonomously, so the team at ground control had to wait several minutes for communications to be establish to confirm that the landing was successful.

There was also some last minute re-jigging required before the landing attempt, as the spacecraft made both an extra correction maneuver to raise the spacecraft’s orbit and performed an addition orbit before beginning the landing sequence. But the extra care paid off, as the landing was successful and the lander can now begin its operations with its 12 payloads.

Six of the onboard payloads are NASA experiments, with the other six being from other private companies. The mission is expected to last for around a week, collecting data from the lunar south pole.