Intuitive Machines Inc. entered History was made Thursday when the Houston-based space exploration company's Odysseus spacecraft became the first commercial lander to successfully reach the moon.
The unmanned Odysseus lander is also the first American spacecraft to reach the lunar surface since the Apollo 17 Challenger lunar module in December 1972.
LUNR intuitive machines are involved,
It rose more than 37% after hours on Thursday on the back of news of the successful landing. The stock ended the day's regular trading down 11.2% but is up 184.5% in the past three months.
Odysseus, carrying NASA's science and technology instruments, arrived at the moon's south pole at 6:23 p.m. ET Thursday, after an autonomous landing that ended its journey to the moon. A few nerve-wracking minutes followed as Intuitive Machines mission control waited for communications from the lander, before confirming that a faint signal had been received from Odysseus' high-gain antenna.
“Our equipment is on the surface of the moon, and we are sending,” the mission director said in a live broadcast of the landing.
“After troubleshooting communications, flight controllers have confirmed that Odysseus is upright and has begun transmitting data,” Intuitive Machines, formally known as X, wrote on Twitter at 8:25 p.m. ET. “Right now, we are working on correlating the first images from the lunar surface.”
Odysseus landed near the Moon's Malapert A crater, an area chosen as a relatively flat and safe landing zone amid the cratered southern highlands of the Moon.
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The landing zone was also chosen because the location will help mission planners understand how to communicate and send data back to Earth from a location where Earth is low on the lunar horizon, according to NASA.
The mission carries NASA instruments focused on plume-surface interactions, space weather and lunar surface interactions, radio astronomy, precision landing techniques, and the communications and navigation node for future autonomous navigation technologies, according to the space agency.
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Commercial lunar landings are important exploration missions for NASA's Artemis lunar exploration program. Last month, NASA said it was targeting September 2025 for the first crewed Artemis mission around the moon, and September 2026 for the Artemis mission to land astronauts near the moon's south pole.
Intuitive Machines' Nova-C class lunar lander, named Odysseus after Homer's “Odyssey” hero, was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 15. The lM-1 mission was timed to take into account the lunar blackout period; Correct lighting conditions are available for only a few days each month near the Moon's south pole.
Complex lunar missions bring a high degree of risk. Only five countries – the United States, the Soviet Union, China, India, and Japan – completed lunar landings, and the United States was the only country to put astronauts on the moon. In January, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Lunar Exploration Intelligent Unmanned Lander, or SLIM, touched down on the lunar surface, but the lander appeared upside down on the lunar surface in an image taken by the SLIM rover.
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Other commercial lunar landings have also encountered problems. In 2019, the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft attempted to become the first private lander on the moon, but it crashed while trying to land. Four years later, Japan's own Hakuto-R mission also failed to achieve a “soft landing” on the moon.
Last month, private US space company Astrobotic Technology completed its stalled mission to put the Peregrine lander on the moon's surface.
Like Astrobotic's Peregrine lander, Intuitive's Nova-C lander is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative to deliver science and technology to the lunar surface.
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The Nova-C landers are scheduled to undertake three missions to the Moon, each containing minor modifications to the vehicle, according to Intuitive Machines.
