A 15-foot-tall spacecraft had an imperfect landing on the moon.
The NASA-funded mission to the moon, operated by the Houston space exploration company Intuitive Machines, touched down on March 6, but engineers are still uncertain about its orientation and overall condition. Is the spacecraft, for example, lying on its side?
Though the robotic craft, called Athena, performed excellently on its flight to and around the moon, this landing mishap comes a year after Intuitive Machines' first government-supported attempt resulted in the spacecraft landing hard, breaking a leg, and settling on its side.
"I think we can agree, particularly today, that landing on the moon is extremely hard," Nicola Fox, who leads NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said at an agency news conference on March 6.
Athena fired thrusters to brake at speeds of some 4,000 mph during its final descent. Intuitive Machines is confident the craft landed on the towering Mons Mouton, a lunar mountain near the moon's south pole rising 20,000 feet above the surrounding terrain. It's unclear, however, how far Athena may be from its intended landing site within Mons Mouton. This southern region is rich in water ice, and is relatively close to where NASA intends to bring astronauts in mid-2027.
Athena is currently charging on the lunar surface — meaning some sunlight is reaching the craft. It's communicating with Intuitive Machine's engineers, too. But much of the mission now remains in limbo.
"We think we've been very successful to this point," Steve Altemus, the chief executive officer of Intuitive Machines, said at the press conference. "But we don't think we're in the correct attitude on the surface of the moon again."
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Crucially, the lander is equipped with a NASA drill, called PRIME-1, to investigate south pole resources in anticipation of astronauts returning to the moon. The instrument is designed to drill some three feet below the lunar surface, and another instrument, called a spectrometer, looks for water and other materials. It remains unknown if the drill will be able to function in a non-optimal orientation, but NASA and Intuitive Machines will discern that capability in the coming weeks.
The drill is important. Harvesting water ice, the space agency has emphasized, is crucial for making drinkable water, oxygen, and fuel for rockets. Over eons, comets and meteors striking the moon could have transported bounties of water to the moon's surface. Other sources could be water vapor that naturally seeped out of the lunar underground, or chemical reactions between oxygen in the lunar soil and the relentless solar wind.
But without finding and mining this ice, the U.S. cannot establish a permanent presence on the moon, a pivotal part of its Artemis program.
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In a sign of burgeoning commerical space exploration in the 21st century, Athena (however impaired) joins the Blue Ghost lander, built by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace, which successfully touched down on the moon's near side on March 2. That craft is also part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which consists of robotic technical and science endeavors that support looming crewed lunar missions.
"The risk will always be there."
Landing on the moon remains daunting, largely because it's a world with virtually no atmosphere to slow spacecraft down. A craft must plummet to the surface perfectly, as thrusters fire to slow its descent onto a surface teeming with pits and craters. Although Chinese and Indian craft have had recent landing successes, the Intuitive Machines' spacecraft Odysseus sustained damage while landing awkwardly in 2024. The same year, a Japanese craft landed upside down, on its head.
Athena also carried both a small rover and hopper, designed to test moon exploration technologies in a crater-blanketed world. We'll soon find out if these machines can depart Athena, and bound over the lunar surface.
Such robotic landing missions are high-risk and high-reward endeavors, NASA's Fox emphasized.
"The risk will always be there," she said.
