Moon landing: First private spacecraft touches down

“Today for the first time … a commercial company, an American company, has launched and led the voyage up there. This shows the power and promise of NASA’s commercial partnerships. What a triumph!”

NASA has said the creation of a commercially viable lunar economy will be vital to its ambition for a permanent human base on the moon, and eventually, Mars.

Thomas Zurbuchen, professor of space science at ETH Zurich who ran NASA’s science missions until 2022, said the landing “changes the whole paradigm of planetary exploration. Until now, everything has been done by governments. With companies, we can do it a lot cheaper.”

Odysseus’ safe landing was greeted with elation at Intuitive’s mission control in Houston, Texas. In the last few hours the lander had to go into an extra orbit of the moon because its laser navigation system malfunctioned and engineers were forced to use instruments from a NASA payload onboard instead.

NASA paid Intuitive $US118 million ($180 million) to carry six scientific payloads, including instruments to observe space weather from the moon and a radio beacon to aid navigation. The company was also carrying six commercial packages, including mini-sculptures by artist Jeff Koons, a camera to record the 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 ice water, which could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen to help sustain a permanent human presence on the moon. India last year 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 floated on 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 aimed to eventually provide a range of lunar services from communications to navigation and even power generation.

“We will have the most data about the moon, the most understanding,” he said. “You take that first step and then a whole series of unpredicted and forecasted activities [follow] from that.”

Intuitive Machines shares, which had fallen from their 2023 trading debut of $US10.03 to $US2.32 by the start of the year, have risen sharply in recent weeks as the mission passed milestones towards its launch on a Falcon 9 rocket built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

On Thursday, they closed at $US8.28, down 11 per cent.

A lunar landing attempt by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology failed last month when problems with the spacecraft’s propulsion system resulted in a critical loss of fuel soon after its launch.

An unmanned Japanese rover touched down on the moon in January, but an upside-down landing made it difficult to generate solar power, curtailing its ability to explore the lunar surface.

Financial Times