Latest commercial moon spacecraft makes troubled landing

Efforts underway to determine its orientation

This story has been updated.

A lunar lander that’s about as tall as a giraffe touched down on a lunar plateau around 12:30 p.m. Eastern time today, but exchanges among staff at the manufacturer’s command center showed that it experienced technical issues, and its status on the surface was left unclear when the internet broadcast ended.

“Athena is on the surface of the moon. The team is going through the process of powering down systems that are not required,” a narrator explained during the broadcast from Intuitive Machines’ command center in Houston.

The first clear acknowledgement of trouble came from Chief Technology Officer Tim Crain, who was positioned at one of the consoles. “All right, team, keep working the problem,” he instructed. “We are working to evaluate exactly what our orientation is on the surface.”

At a post-landing press conference, CEO Stephen Altemus said his team plans to obtain a picture from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter with the aim of determining the lander’s orientation. “I can say, though, that we are charging on the surface. We have commanding uplink and downlink from the vehicle to our ground network on the ground in eight dishes in six different countries.”

The Athena robotic lander was launched on Feb. 26 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The company’s first lander, Odysseus, tipped over in February 2024 as it touched down on the lunar surface in the IM-1 mission. The company blamed a faulty laser altimeter that was to gauge distance from the lunar surface.

In today’s IM-2 mission, the Athena lander touched down on Mons Mouton, a lunar plateau near the moon’s south pole. The mission follows that of another Texas company, Firefly Aerospace, which landed its Blue Ghost probe on the moon on Sunday and delivered an image of its shadow and Earth in the distance that has been circulated widely.

The landers were built in part with NASA funds under the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative to gather science and knowledge about on-site resources ahead of the return of U.S. astronauts to the moon under the Artemis program.

Intuitive Machines reportedly made a variety of changes to software and hardware to correct problems encountered during the previous mission.

Among the instruments on the Athena lander is a NASA payload, Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 (PRIME-1), a drill that will pierce the surface to detect any water ice that may be present. And, it carries a drone named Grace equipped with its own thrusters and a neutron spectrometer to explore the permanently shadowed region of the nearby Marston crater.

Intuitive Machines said in a September press release that it had received a contract from NASA for a “maximum potential value of $4.82 billion.”