Private lunar lander touches down on the moon, but its status is unknown

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A privately owned lunar lander touched down on the moon with a drill, drone and rovers for NASA and other customers Thursday, but quickly ran into trouble and may have fallen over.

Intuitive Machines said it was uncertain whether its Athena lander was upright near the moon’s south pole — standing 15 feet tall — or lying sideways like its first spacecraft from a year ago. Controllers rushed to turn off some of the lander’s equipment to conserve power while trying to determine what went wrong.

It was the second moon landing this week by a Texas company under NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program. Sunday’s touchdown was a success.

The company’s newest Athena lander dropped out of lunar orbit as planned. The hourlong descent appeared to go well until the final approach when the laser navigation system began acting up. It took a while for Mission Control to confirm touchdown.

“We’re on the surface,” mission director and co-founder Tim Crain reported. 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.”

Hours after the landing, Intuitive Machines Chief Executive Steve Altemus said there was conflicting data about how Athena landed and whether it was on its side. The lander was near the intended target site, but a sweep by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in the coming days will confirm its position and orientation, he said.

Launched last week, Athena was communicating with controllers more than 230,000 miles away and generating solar power, officials said. Mission managers worked to salvage the mission to see whether the drill can be turned on and the drone can be deployed to hop into a crater.

“Obviously, without knowing the exact orientation of the lander, it’s hard to say exactly what science we will and will not be able to do,” said NASA’s top science officer, Nicky Fox.

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 100 miles from the south pole, much closer than before. It reached the plateau, but Intuitive Machines was not sure how near it was to the precise targeted spot.

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 jump-start business. The commercial landers are also seen as scouts for astronauts who are scheduled to 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 jump into a permanently shadowed crater near the landing site in search of frozen water.

To lower costs, 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.

Dunn writes for the Associated Press.