A spacecraft built and flown by a private US firm has landed near the moon's south pole.
and flown by Texas-based company Intuitive Machines landed near the moon’s south pole on Thursday, the first US 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, touched down at about 6.23pm US Eastern , the company and Nasa commentators said in a joint webcast of the landing from Intuitive Machines’ mission operations centre in Houston. 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”.
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. Thursday’s landing represented the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a US spacecraft since Apollo 17 in 1972, when Nasa’s last crewed moon mission landed there with astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt.