‘Odysseus’ in space: for the first time in history a private spacecraft landed on the moon

A spacecraft built and flown by the company ‘Intuitive Machines’ from Texas in the United States landed last night (Thursday) near the south pole of the moon. This is the first time that an American spacecraft has landed on the moon in more than half a century. This is also the first landing of a private aircraft on the moon ever, after three failed attempts so far: American, Japanese and Israeli.

NASA hailed the landing as a significant step towards its goal of sending a fleet of commercial spacecraft for scientific reconnaissance missions on the moon. This is in preparation for the plan to send astronauts to the moon again later in the decade. However, communication difficulties after the landing caused concern that there was some defect in the spacecraft.

After the engineers solved a problem in the navigation system with the help of an untried detour, and after the break in the reception of radio transmissions ended, the landing of the robotic lander ‘Odysseus’ was confirmed.

The weak signal received from the spacecraft indicated that it may have landed near something that blocked its antenna, or damaged the antenna, Thomas Zorbuchen, who oversaw the creation of NASA’s private lunar landing program, told Reuters.

“Sometimes it’s just a rock, one big rock is what gets in the way,” Zorbuchen said, “and endangers the deployment of the designated payloads, and the achievement of the scientific goals. The landing is an important intermediate goal, but to send back images, to do science.”