First ever commercial moon landing touches down at lunar south pole

(CN) — Houston-based company Intuitive Machines achieved the first ever private lunar landing on Thursday evening, with its Nova-C lander “Odysseus” touching down shortly before 5:30 p.m. Central Time.

Carrying 12 payloads — six NASA science instruments and six commercial accoutrements — Odysseus touched down near the lunar south polar region, an area NASA has targeted for the establishment of a crewed moon base as part of its Artemis program.

The spacecraft launched from Cape Kennedy on the back of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket last week, and landed after flight complications delayed its final descent by over a half hour. Without any humans on board the craft and with no preexisting cameras around the lunar south pole, Intuitive Machines’ flight team could only confirm the landing after the fact.

The team considered the possibility of a botched landing after they lost communication with Odysseus shortly after the expected touchdown time. They were able to detect a faint signal from the craft’s high-gain antenna several minutes later, but questions as to the craft’s fate remained at time of publishing.

One of the commercial payloads the Odysseus carried was the “EagleCam,” developed at Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University. The EagleCam was meant to detach from Odysseus before landing and capture the first-ever third-person images of a spacecraft landing on the moon, though no EagleCam footage has yet been released publicly.

“What we can confirm without a doubt is our equipment is on the surface of the moon, and we are transmitting,” Intuitive Mission Director Tim Crain said moments after landing as the rest of the flight team continued to assess the situation.

Besides being the first commercial landing in history, Intuitive Machines’ mission to the moon, dubbed IM-1, is the second mission in NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

Through this program, the agency has contracted with private companies to send a number of payloads and scientific instruments to the moon. The landing comes over a month after the first failed moon flight in the payload program by U.S.-based company Astrobotic. Another U.S.-based company, United Launch Alliance, successfully launched the Astrobotic’s Peregrine spacecraft in early January, but the Peregrine’s propulsion system malfunctioned mid-flight and put a moon landing out of reach.

Through the payload program and other initiatives, NASA is leaning into the increasing privatization of space exploration.

SpaceX — owned by billionaire Elon Musk and another NASA commercial partner — is currently tasked with designing a “human landing system” out of its Starship line of rockets that can ferry crew and goods from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface. Yet another company, Axiom, is developing a new generation of lunar spacesuits.

NASA officials have claimed these private-public partnerships will allow the agency to increase the pace of space exploration and expand its scientific operations, especially considering the Artemis program’s aim to return humans to the moon.

“This is not an easy thing we have asked these companies to do, but if they’re successful, the upside for American exploration is just so great we have to try it,” NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Joel Kearns said in a pre-landing presentation the space agency hosted Thursday.

But Intuitive Machines itself has made no secret of looking to turn a profit from lunar exploration and further the development of purely commercial interests in space — creating, as Intuitive Machines’ communications director Josh Marshall put it, a “lunar economy.”

In this lunar economy, the space agency “encourages a model where NASA is just one of many customers,” according to NASA communications representative Gary Jordan.

“A true lunar economy should not just have NASA as a sole customer,” Jordan said while commentating the landing.

Some critics have raised the concern that giving such leeway to commercial interests would allow skyward-looking billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to pursue their own interests in space over those of the public, or stretch the tenets of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

The Treaty states that exploration of the moon and all celestial bodies “shall be the province of all mankind,” and expressly forbids nations from claiming any form of sovereignty over the moon. But it’s silent on the question of private ownership by wealthy capitalists.

There are also more practical concerns with leaning so heavily on private companies.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced last month that the agency hoped to put humans on the moon for the first time since 1972 in September 2026, a year’s delay from an earlier 2025 target.

According to a November 2023 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, even the revised date may be too optimistic a timeframe. The report instead predicts a moon landing no earlier than 2027, citing issues with systems being developed by the same private corporations on which NASA is leaning, particularly the SpaceX Human Landing System.

“We found that if the human landing system development takes as many months as NASA major projects do, on average, the Artemis III mission would likely occur in early 2027,” the office says in the report.

Nelson nevertheless congratulated Intuitive Machines after touchdown was confirmed Thursday night. He remarked that it was the first time in over 50 years that a piece of American-made hardware had landed on the moon.

“Today for the first time in more than a half century, the U.S. has returned to the moon,” Nelson said.

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