I've got some very fresh news for you: Athena, a spacecraft funded by NASA but built and operated by the Texas-based aerospace company Intuitive Machines, has made moonfall. The landing occurred shortly after 12:30 P.M. EST, in a region near the moon's south pole.
This marks the second successful lunar landing of this week, after Sunday's early-morning touchdown of Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost mission. Athena and Blue Ghost alike are especially notable because they are each products of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which is outsourcing the space agency's lunar cargo delivery to the U.S. private sector. NASA hopes to save costs and advance innovation with this novel public-private partnership, all in service of prepping for a long-planned crewed lunar return later this decade as part of its Artemis program.
But there's always a catch, and in this case it's the fact that before CLPS no successful commercial lunar landings had ever taken place; thus, the initiative is meant to be risk-tolerant and more accepting of failures. Reaching the surface of the moon intact remains a very hard task, despite multiple space agencies managing the feat since the first successes by the U.S. and former U.S.S.R. in the mid-1960s. The first CLPS mission, Astrobotic's Peregrine lander, failed to even reach the moon after springing a propellant leak shortly after its January 2024 launch. The following month, Athena's predecessor, the Intuitive Machines lander Odysseus, successfully landed but at an angle that hindered some of its subsequent surface activities.
Blue Ghost pulled off an essentially flawless landing on Sunday, but for now Athena's status remains somewhat uncertain. Although mission controllers confirmed the spacecraft's lunar landing, Athena's telemetry presented several puzzling anomalies, such as an indication that the lander was still firing its engine after its planned touchdown. As personnel in the Intuitive Machines mission-control center rushed to better understand the situation, the livestream relaying the scene to the world at large abruptly ended.
What will Athena's fate be? At this point, I can only speculate, but even an off-nominal result would still portend a bright future for ongoing U.S. lunar exploration. Let's cross our fingers, and stay tuned.
—Lee Billings
