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Intuitive Machines has landed a second spacecraft on the moon, just one year after accomplishing the feat for the first time ever. Unfortunately, much like that first attempt, it seems the company’s spacecraft may have tipped on its side.
The lunar lander, called Athena, touched down on the moon’s surface at around 12:30 p.m. ET on Thursday. It’s the second private spacecraft to land on the moon this week, after Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost touched down on March 2.
Intuitive Machines’ chief technology officer said in a post-landing press conference that Athena is somewhere inside the 50-meter landing zone on Mons Mouton, a flat-topped mountain on the moon’s south pole. But he said the company was still working on determining where, exactly, Athena touched down.
CEO Steve Altemus added during the conference that the company doesn’t think Athena is at the “correct attitude” — spaceflight speak for “it probably tipped over.”
Altemus otherwise praised the mission, which he said went much more smoothly than last year’s trip to the moon.
The rest of Athena’s mission now hangs in the balance. The spacecraft, which took off for the moon aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 26, is carrying a number of technologies that Intuitive Machines hoped to test out.
One is a passive laser retroreflector array, which Intuitive Machines hopes to use to communicate with other incoming or orbiting spacecraft. It’s a crucial piece of technology for NASA’s hopes to build a permanent moon base — so much so that the space agency awarded Intuitive Machines a $4.8 billion contract late last year to build out the communications system. (Only $150 million of that is guaranteed.)
Athena is also carrying an ice mining experiment for NASA, which the agency had hoped to use to determine whether there are enough natural resources on the moon to one day make fuel or breathable oxygen.
Additional payloads include a rover called MAPP that is supposed to test out cellular equipment from Nokia, and solid state storage billed as the first ever “lunar data center.”
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
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