A moon lander built by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines reached lunar orbit on Wednesday, headed for an attempt at the first U.S. touchdown on Earth's nearest celestial neighbor in more than 50 years and the first ever by a private spacecraft.
The six-legged Nova-C lander, dubbed Odysseus, entered a circular orbit 57 miles (92 km) above the lunar surface after firing its main rocket thruster for nearly seven minutes in an orbital insertion maneuver, the company said in an online statement.
Assuming all goes according to plan, the robot spacecraft is expected to gradually lower its orbit over the next 24 hours and land at crater Malapert A near the moon's south pole at 5:49 p.m. EST (2249 GMT) on Thursday, carrying a suite of NASA science instruments and technology demonstrations.
Odysseus was launched six days ago, on Feb. 15, atop a Falcon 9 rocket built and flown by Elon Musk's California-based company SpaceX from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
If the landing succeeds, the IM-1 mission would represent the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a U.S. spacecraft since Apollo 17, when NASA's last crewed moon mission carried Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt landed there in 1972.
History in the making
It also would mark the first "soft landing" on the moon ever by a commercially manufactured and operated vehicle and the first under NASA's Artemis lunar program, as the U.S. races to return astronauts to Earth's natural satellite before China lands its own crewed spacecraft there.
The IM-1 mission comes about a month after the lunar lander of another firm, Astrobotic Technology, suffered a propulsion system leak on its way to the moon shortly after being placed in orbit on Jan. 8 by a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan rocket making its debut flight.
The malfunction of Astrobotic's Peregrine lander, which was also flying NASA payloads to the moon, was the third time a private company had failed to achieve a lunar touchdown, following ill-fated efforts by companies from Israel and Japan.
The rise of commercial spaceflight
Those mishaps illustrated the risks NASA faces in leaning more heavily on the commercial sector than it had in the past to realize its spaceflight goals.
Although considered an Intuitive Machines mission, the IM-1 flight is carrying six NASA payloads of instruments designed to gather data about the lunar environment ahead of NASA's planned first crewed Artemis mission to the moon later this decade.
NASA announced last month that it was delaying its target date for the first crewed Artemis moon landing from 2025 to late 2026, while China has said it was aiming for 2030.
A new space race?
Small landers such as Nova-C are expected to get there first, carrying instruments to closely survey the lunar landscape, its resources, and potential hazards. Odysseus will focus on space weather interactions with the moon's surface, radio astronomy, precision landing technologies, and navigation.
To date, spacecraft from just five countries have ever landed on the moon - the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, India, and, most recently, just last month, Japan.