IT ALL SEEMS to have gone sideways—and for the second time. On March 6th an American firm called Intuitive Machines tried to land a robotic spacecraft called Athena near the Moon’s south pole. Things began promisingly enough. The lander fired up its engine on schedule, making its way down from lunar orbit. Even the loss of communications in the final stages of descent was to be expected. After a couple of nail-biting minutes, however, Intuitive announced that although Athena was on the lunar surface, its status was “unclear”.
By the following day, a picture taken by the lander confirmed the truth: like a forlorn metallic beetle, Athena had tipped over onto its side and was lying helpless on the lunar surface. With its solar panels pointing in the wrong direction, the lander’s battery power soon ran out. For Intuitive Machines, the incident is doubly embarrassing. In February 2024 the company had sent another lander, called Odysseus, that likewise tipped over soon after touching down on the Moon.
But there is good news for the private lunar-exploration business, too. Four days before Athena’s final descent, Firefly Aerospace, another American firm, landed a spacecraft of its own, Blue Ghost, without a hitch in Mare Crisium, near the lunar equator. Prior to those three missions, America had not landed any sort of spacecraft—crewed, robotic, skew-whiff or upright—on the Moon since the final Apollo mission in 1972.
Athena and Blue Ghost each carried a gaggle of science experiments. Athena’s were focused on hunting for water ice, which is thought to exist in relatively large quantities in the permanently shadowed corners of several lunar craters. (Intuitive claimed that, despite the tipping-over, at least some of those instruments had been able to do something before the lander’s batteries gave out, though it gave no details.) Blue Ghost is more interested in the lunar regolith, the layer of crushed rock that is the closest thing the Moon has to soil. By March 7th, eight of its ten experiments had completed their work. The hope is that the data will help prepare the way for the return of American astronauts who are, at least for now, scheduled to land towards the end of the decade.
The traffic is only going to get thicker. Three more private American landers are due to launch before the end of the year. Blue Moon is built by Blue Origin, a space company set up by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; it could launch as early as March. Griffin, a lander built by Astrobotic Technology, will arrive in September. Intuitive Machines will be hoping that its third try, in October, will prove the charm. A lander built by iSpace, a Japanese company, which is taking a long but energy-efficient course, will arrive in June; another operated by SpaceIL, an Israeli organisation, is due at an unspecified date in 2025.
Much of this activity is the fruit of a long-standing strategy at NASA, America’s space agency, to stop running some missions itself, instead farming them out to private contractors. The switch began in 2008, when the agency awarded contracts to fly cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) to SpaceX, then a startup, and Orbital Sciences, a veteran aerospace firm. These days NASA relies on SpaceX to fly astronauts to the ISS as well, and has tapped private firms to build replacements for the station itself, which is due to be decommissioned in 2030.
Building on these successes, the hope is that a new generation of private firms, often operating under fixed-price contracts, will be able to move faster and do more than the big aerospace contractors that the agency has historically employed on a cost-plus basis. The standout success of the new model has been SpaceX, whose reusable rockets have slashed the costs of getting into orbit (all of the private Moon missions so far have been launched on the company’s Falcon rockets).
Some private firms even have ambitions beyond the Moon. Rocket Lab, an American maker of rockets and satellites, is working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build and fly a probe to Venus. Due to launch in 2026, and built on a budget of less than $10m, it will hunt for organic molecules (that is, those that contain carbon) in the Venusian atmosphere. Given no American probe has visited Venus in over 30 years, its results will be eagerly awaited. ■