Feb 23 (Reuters) - A spacecraft built and flown by Texas-based company Intuitive Machines landed near the moon's south pole on Thursday, the first U.S. touchdown on the lunar surface in more than half a century and the first ever achieved by the private sector.

1. Feb 23 (Reuters) - A spacecraft built and flown by Texas-based company Intuitive Machines landed near
the moon's south pole on Thursday, the first U.S. touchdown on the lunar surface in more than half a
century and the first ever achieved by the private sector.
NASA, with several research instruments aboard the vehicle, hailed the landing as a major achievement in
its goal of sending a squad of commercially flown spacecraft on scientific scouting missions to the moon
ahead of a planned return of astronauts there later this decade.
Advertisement · Scroll to continue
But initial communications problems following Thursday's landing raised questions about whether the
vehicle may have been left impaired or obstructed in some way.
The uncrewed six-legged robot lander, dubbed Odysseus, touched down at about 6:23 p.m. EST (2323
GMT), the company and NASA commentators said in a joint webcast of the landing from Intuitive
Machines' (LUNR.O) mission operations center in Houston.
Advertisement · Scroll to continue
Moon landing: US clinches first
touchdown in 50 years
By Steve Gorman and Joey Roulette
February 23, 2024 3:50 PM GMT+9 · Updated 6 hours ago
Space
Exclusive news, data and analytics for financial market professionals
World Business Markets Sustainability More My View Sign In Register
Feedback

2. The landing capped a nail-biting final approach and descent in which a problem surfaced with the
spacecraft's autonomous navigation system that required engineers on the ground to employ an untested
work-around at the 11th hour.
It also took some time after an anticipated radio blackout to re-establish communications with the
spacecraft and determine its fate some 239,000 miles (384,000 km) from Earth.
Advertisement · Scroll to continue
When contact was finally renewed, the signal was faint, confirming that the lander had touched down but
leaving mission control immediately uncertain as to the precise condition and orientation of the vehicle,
according to the webcast.
"Our equipment is on the surface of the moon, and we are transmitting, so congratulations IM team,"
Intuitive Machines mission director Tim Crain was heard telling the operations center. "We'll see what
more we can get from that."
Later in the evening, the company posted a message on the social media platform X saying flight
controllers "have confirmed Odysseus is upright and starting to send data."
QUESTION OF OBSTRUCTION
Still, the weak signal suggested the spacecraft may have landed next to a crater wall or something else
that blocked or impinged its antenna, said Thomas Zurbuchen, a former NASA science chief who oversaw
creation of the agency's commercial moon lander program.
"Sometimes it could just be one rock, one big boulder, that's in the way," he said in a phone interview with
Reuters.
Such an issue could complicate the lander's primary mission of deploying its payloads and meeting
science objectives, Zurbuchen said.
Accomplishing the landing is "a major intermediate goal, but the goal of the mission is to do science, and
get the pictures back and so forth," he added.
[1/3] Intuitive Machines' Odysseus spacecraft passes over the near side of the Moon following lunar orbit insertion on
February 21, 2024, in this handout image released February 22, 2024. Intuitive Machines/Handout via REUTERS
Purchase Licensing Rights
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson immediately cheered Thursday's feat as a "triumph," saying, "Odysseus
has taken the moon."
As planned, the spacecraft was believed to have come to rest at a crater named Malapert A near the
moon's south pole, according to the webcast. The spacecraft was not designed to provide live video of the
landing, which came one day after it reached lunar orbit and a week after its launch from Florida.
Thursday's landing represented the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a U.S. spacecraft since
Apollo 17 in 1972, when NASA's last crewed moon mission landed there with astronauts Gene Cernan and
Harrison Schmitt.
To date, spacecraft from just four other countries have ever landed on the moon - the former Soviet Union,
China, India and, mostly recently, just last month, Japan. The United States is the only one ever to have
sent humans to the lunar surface.
Odysseus is carrying a suite of scientific instruments and technology demonstrations for NASA and several
commercial customers designed to operate for seven days on solar energy before the sun sets over the

3. Rising interest in
Japan’s startup scene
Sponsored by JETRO
아람코는 엔진이 환경에 미치는 영향을 어떻게 줄이고 있을까요?
Sponsored by
Aramco
Click Here
탄소 포집, 활용 및 저장(CCUS)은
어떻게 이루어지고 있을까요?
Sponsored by
Aramco
비금속 소재는 전 세계의 에너지
관련 도전과제를 어떻게 해결할
수 있을까요?
Sponsored by
Aramco
Sponsored Content
Sponsored Content
비금속 솔루션: 성장 기회를
가진 5개의 주요 산업
Sponsored by Aramco
모두를 위한 저탄소 수송 제
공
Sponsored by Aramco
아람코는 엔진이 환경에 미치
는 영향을 어떻게 줄이고 있
을까요?
Sponsored by Aramco
탄소순환경제가 어떻게 탄소
발자국을 줄이고 있을까요?
Sponsored by Aramco
최첨단 소재의 잠재력을 탐구
합니다.
Sponsored by Aramco
탄소 포집, 활용 및 저장
(CCUS)은 어떻게 이루어지고
있을까요?
Sponsored by Aramco
polar landing site.
The NASA payload focuses on space weather interactions with the moon's surface, radio astronomy and
other aspects of the lunar environment for future landing missions.
Odysseus was sent on its way to the moon last Thursday atop a Falcon 9 rocket launched by Elon Musk's
company SpaceX from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
DAWN OF ARTEMIS
Its arrival marked the first "soft landing" on the moon ever by a commercially manufactured and operated
vehicle and the first under NASA's Artemis lunar program, as the U.S. races to return astronauts to Earth's
natural satellite before China lands its own crewed spacecraft there.
NASA aims to land its first crewed Artemis in late 2026 as part of long-term, sustained lunar exploration
and a stepping stone toward eventual human flights to Mars. The initiative focuses on the moon's south
pole in part because a presumed bounty of frozen water exists there that can be used for life support and
production of rocket fuel.
A host of small landers like Odysseus are expected to pave the way under NASA's Commercial Lunar
Payload Services (CLPS) program, designed to deliver instruments and hardware to the moon at lower
costs than the U.S. space agency's traditional method of building and launching those vehicles itself.
Leaning more heavily on smaller, less experienced private ventures comes with its own risks.
Just last month the lunar lander of another firm, Astrobotic Technology, suffered a propulsion system leak
on its way to the moon shortly after being placed in orbit on Jan. 8 by a United Launch Alliance (ULA)
Vulcan rocket.
The malfunction of Astrobotic's Peregrine lander marked the third failure of a private company to achieve
a lunar touchdown, following ill-fated efforts by companies from Israel and Japan.
Although Odysseus is the latest star of NASA's CLPS program, the IM-1 flight is considered an Intuitive
Machines mission. The company was co-founded in 2013 by Stephen Altemus, former deputy director of
NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and now the company's president and CEO.
Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Joey Roulette in Washington; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Sonali
Paul, Josie Kao and Raju Gopalakrishnan
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Purchase Licensing Rights
Read Next
Business
Intuitive Machines rockets
higher after landing
spacecraft on moon
Shares of Intuitive Machines
shot up 43% in premarket
trading after the space…
Space
Moon landing: US clinches
first touchdown in 50 years
A spacecraft built and flown by
Texas-based company Intuitive
Machines landed near the…
World
US warned Russia over
space weapons, US official
says
The United States has directly
warned Russia against
launching a new nuclear arm…
Space
Scientists iden
star born out o
seen in 1987
When a star up to
mass of our sun e
nearby galaxy, th