Tipped again: Commercial lander on the moon but not upright

Commercial company Intuitive Machines has had some luck getting its lunar landers to the surface of the moon, but hasn’t had any luck keeping them upright.

The Houston-based company flying its second mission under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program made history in 2024 becoming the first commercial company to manage a soft landing on the moon. That lander named Odysseus, though, tipped over limiting the science it was able to perform for NASA.

CEO Steve Altemus said the company is in the same predicament with its new lander named Athena, which managed to touch down near the moon’s south pole at 12:31 p.m. Eastern time Thursday, but didn’t stick the landing.

“We don’t believe we’re in the correct attitude on the surface of the moon, yet again,” he said.

The company has yet to get a complete picture of just what position its in, and is waiting to understand that completely before figuring out just what it can do with all of the payloads it has on board for both NASA as well as several commercial partners.

“I want to get all the measurements and the pictures to really be able to explain to you the configuration of the vehicle,” Altemus said. “I don’t have a good sense of that today. I’m sorry, I have to get more data from that.”

The imperfect landing comes just five days since NASA saw greater success with another commercial company Firefly Aerospace, which managed to remain upright with its Blue Ghost lander on Sunday.

Athena’s destination was a lunar plateau called Mons Mouton, one of NASA’s potential landing spots for future human missions under its Artemis program. It’s the farthest south any government or private company has ever attempted to land.

“I think we can all agree, particularly today, that landing on the moon is extremely hard and Intuitive Machines 2 was aiming to land in a place that humanity has not been to before,” said NASA’s Nicky Fox, associate administrator with the Science Mission Directorate. “We do know that it is returning data, and we look forward to actually being able to work with Intuitive Machines on a plan to return as much science data and technology data as we can during its stay on the moon.”

The lander approached the surface, descending from a lunar orbit where it was going 4,000 mph, slowing to about 3 feet per second. Its final moments before touchdown and status after landing were initially unclear.

“It looks like we’re down,” the company’s mission director Tim Crain said. “We’re working to evaluate exactly what our orientation is on the surface.”

The company was able to communicate with the lander, though, and solar power was being generated, but no photo was released in the hours after landing.

Altemus said they also want to get an image from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which may not come for another day or two.

He tried to put the mission into perspective.

“Any time that you ship a spacecraft to Florida for flight and end up a week later, operating on the moon. I declare that a success,” he said.

The imperfect landing, though, didn’t fare well with investors for the publicly traded company. It’s stock closed down more than 20% on Thursday.

Altemus detailed what efforts it might try to do to save as much of the science and technology experiments that it can for the duration of the mission.

“We are communicating. We can command payloads on and off. We can send commands to the vehicle,” he said.

The company did power down many of the lander’s systems, though, to conserve energy while it figured out how long it will be able to operate and which objectives can still be accomplished.

“When we get that full assessment, we will then work closely with NASA science and technology groups to identify science objectives that are the highest priority, and then we’ll figure out what the what the mission profile will look like,” he said. “It will be off nominal, because we’re not getting everything that we had asked for in terms of power generation, communications, etc.”

Its main payload for NASA is the PRIME-1 drill, which stands for Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1. It was built to dig straight down and analyze lunar regolith from as deep as 3 feet, on the hunt especially for frozen water.

But depending on the orientation of the lander, it could still potentially be deployed.

Although Athena’s final disposition has not been confirmed, it did become the second robotic moon landing this week following the success by Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander.

Unlike Firefly’s long trip to the moon, which launched mid-January before making the final descent 45 days later, Intuitive Machines opted for a quick route — having launched from Florida's Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Feb. 26.

The goal after landing was to have about 10 days of lunar daylight to complete its scientific experiments.

The missions were funded in part by NASA, which seeks to transition the agency to simply become a customer of private companies when it needs to get something on the moon.

Athena’s major payloads were geared toward unlocking the south pole’s secrets armed with several tools looking for ice and gathering data as a potential future site for human exploration.

“We know because of the moon’s tilt, that the craters near the poles are permanently shadowed. They never see the sun, so they’re extremely cold, and we believe that water and other volatiles could build up inside those craters and in the polar region,” Intuitive Machines chief scientist Ben Bussey said. “That represents a resource for future robotic and human exploration.”

NASA paid the company $62.5 million to carry up the the PRIME-1 drill and other agency payloads. But the lander also sent up items from Lonestar Data Holdings, Columbia Sportswear, Nokia, Lunar Outpost, Puli Space, Dymon Co. Ltd. and the German Aerospace Center.

The Nokia hardware affixed to the lander was also stuck on two payloads designed to move away from it — a mini rover and a hopper.

The Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, or MAPP, rover is from Lunar Outpost. Outfitted with cameras, it features 4G/LTE antennas, looking to create what would be the first cellular network on the moon so it can transmit images that would be relayed back to Earth. The rover will also attempt to collect some regolith as a proof-of-concept, and technically sell it to NASA — although it may be a long time before NASA could collect it if ever.

It also features what would be considered an even tinier rover on top — the MIT AstroAnt robotic swarm prototype — “which will wheel around MAPP’s roof to take temperature readings and monitor its operation,” according to Lunar Outpost.

The Micro Nova Hopper, nicknamed Grace, has its own propulsion system that lets it make a series of jumps away from the lander. Essentially a rocket-fueled drone, it’s designed to make five hops away so it can explore a nearby permanently shadowed region of the moon’s surface.

“We are testing the technology, proving that we can take a drone, if you will, on the surface of the moon, and fly into places that rovers can’t go,” said Trent Martin, Intuitive Machines’ senior vice president for space systems. “We believe that is the future of this technology. We absolutely believe there’s a place for rovers on the moon ... but also there’s a place for hoppers and technologies that allow you to go down into extreme environments where you can’t drive your rover.”

Altemus didn’t rule out attempts to deploy the rover or the hopper.

“We’ve got a very innovative team, and I think if given the time and the opportunity to study the problem, we’ll come up with something great,” he said.

Fox said ahead of the landing she was most excited for the NASA drill payload but also the technology demonstrations of the hopper and Nokia communication systems.

“Those three technologies will open the door and demonstrate science we haven’t done before,” Fox said. “They will demonstrate how we’re going to live and work on the lunar surface and prepare us to have humans on Mars.”

Acting NASA Administrator Janet Petro said the moon has proved to be difficult, with less than half of soft landing attempts finding success.

“Even back in the Apollo days, the seven times we landed on the moon, it was very, very challenging,” she said. “Each lander is unique, so each is developed differently, and the harshness of the environment, with no atmosphere, the dust that’s going to spring up when it lands, all these conditions make it really, really hard to do it right.”

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