CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A privately owned lunar lander touched down on the moon Thursday, but as the minutes dragged on, flight controllers could not confirm its condition or whether it was even upright near the south pole.
The last time Intuitive Machines landed a spacecraft on the moon, a year ago, it ended up sideways.
The company’s newest Athena lander dropped out of lunar orbit as planned, carrying an ice drill, a drone and two rovers for NASA and others. The hourlong descent appeared to go well, but it took a while for Mission Control to confirm touchdown.
“We’re on the surface,” reported mission director and co-founder Tim Crain. A few minutes later, he repeated, “It looks like we’re down … We are working to evaluate exactly what our orientation is on the surface.”
Launched last week, Athena was communicating with controllers more than 230,000 miles (375,000 kilometers) away and generating solar power, officials said. But nearly a half-hour after touchdown, Crain and his team still were unable to confirm if everything was all right with the 15-foot (4.7-meter) lander. NASA and Intuitive Machines abruptly ended their live webcast, promising more updates at a news conference later in the afternoon.
“OK team, keep working the problem,” Crain urged.
Intuitive Machines last year put the U.S. back on the moon despite its lander tipping on its side. Last weekend, it was joined by another Texas company’s lander.
Firefly Aerospace on Sunday became the first to achieve complete success with its Blue Ghost lunar lander, on the northeastern edge of the near side of the moon. A vacuum already has collected lunar dirt for analysis and a dust shield has shaken off the abrasive particles that cling to everything.
Intuitive Machines was aiming this time for a mountain plateau just 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the south pole, much closer than before.
This week’s back-to-back moon landings are part of NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program meant to get the space agency’s experiments to the gray, dusty surface and jumpstart business. The commercial landers are also seen as scouts for the astronauts who will follow later this decade under NASA’s Artemis program, the successor to Apollo.
NASA officials said before the landing that they knew going in that some of the low-cost missions would fail. But with more private missions to the moon, that increased the number of experiments getting there.
NASA spent tens of millions of dollars on the ice drill and two other instruments riding on Athena, and paid an additional $62 million for the lift. Most of the experiments were from private companies, including the two rovers. The rocket-powered drone came from Intuitive Machines — it’s meant to hop into a permanently shadowed crater near the landing site in search of frozen water.
Intuitive Machines’ Trent Martin said before the flight that Athena needed to land upright in order for the drone and rovers to deploy.
To lower costs even more, Intuitive Machines shared its SpaceX rocket launch with three spacecraft that went their separate ways. Two of them — NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer and AstroForge’s asteroid-chasing Odin — are in jeopardy.
NASA said this week that Lunar Trailblazer is spinning without radio contact and won’t reach its intended orbit around the moon for science observations. Odin is also silent, with its planned asteroid flyby unlikely.
As for Athena, Intuitive Machines made dozens of repairs and upgrades following the company’s sideways touchdown by its first lander. It still managed to operate briefly, ending America’s moon-landing drought of more than 50 years.
Until then, the U.S. had not landed on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. No one else has sent astronauts to the moon, the overriding goal of NASA’s Artemis program. And only four other countries have successfully landed robotic spacecraft on the moon: Russia, China, India and Japan.
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