Houston, March 6, 2025 — In a giant leap for private space exploration, Intuitive Machines’ robotic lander, Athena, has successfully reached the surface of the Moon. However, this success is sullied by uncertainty on the lander’s exact orientation and working status after its landing. The lander was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center on February 27, 2025. It aimed to explore the Moon’s south pole region, targeting the area of Mons Mouton.
This mission, named IM-2, is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program aiming to involve the private sector in lunar missions.
Landing and Current Status
The descent for Athena ended on March 6, 2025. While communications that initially came in confirmed the lander had arrived at the lunar surface, flight controllers have not been able to tell just how the lander is sitting or its condition after landing.
Mission engineers are now focused on getting a secure communication back with the lander and its status after they lost the telemetry data during the last descent. It follows Intuitive Machines’ previous attempt on February 2024, with its Odysseus lander. Although the attempt was successful since it touched down safely, it landed on a slope and ended up in a tilted position. So there remains the concern that Athena will face challenges to make its landings stable over the rough terrain of the lunar south pole.
The uncertainty surrounding the landing of Athena further illustrates the existing challenges in lunar missions but even more so in missions being undertaken by private organizations. Those works, combined with Intuitive Machines, form a broader movement in lunar commercialization in support of NASA’s Artemis program of putting people back on the Moon before 2030.
Even as Athena’s present status remains murky, the mission, still easily among the biggest steps in advancing private sector thought to bear on space exploration, will provide data and experience that inform future activities, assisting with the critical knowledge needed to deal with the challenges of landing on the Moon.
At the same time, other private company Firefly Aerospace successfully landed its Blue Ghost lander on the Moon. Under NASA’s CLPS program, the mission aims to perform experiments on the Moon’s magnetosphere and lunar dust. The existence of Athena and Blue Ghost in the Moon’s orbit indicates a new dawn of private sector involvement with lunar exploration with equal counterpart missions.
As the team of Intuitive Machines works to determine the status of Athena, the outcome of the mission might shed light on the more general challenges faced while operating on a lunar surface. Strictly speaking, any occurrence, whether fortunate or unfortunate, will be analyzed as lessons learned for future missions, private and governmental alike, aimed at sustained lunar exploration and eventual habitation.
Full communication with Athena will be pushed to the limit in the critical coming days while engineers assess its operational capabilities. The global space community is following closely, hoping that the mission will yield useful scientific data that will further promote more vigorous and reliable lunar exploration efforts.
