Lunar lander Odysseus lands on moon's south pole

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.

The uncrewed six-legged robot lander, dubbed Odysseus, which lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 15 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, 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' mission operations center in Houston.

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.

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 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 384,000 kilometers from Earth.

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.

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.

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 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.