‘Athena’ Moon Mission Jeopardized After Skewed Landing

The Houston-based private space exploration company said in a joint news conference with NASA on Thursday that the lander was experiencing issues after touching down. 

On Friday, Intuitive Machines released a statement saying the lander’s batteries had depleted a day after landing inside a crater—250 meters away from its intended landing site in the Mons Mouton region of the lunar south pole.

Images from Athena shared by Intuitive Machines showed that the lander was on its side.

“After landing, mission controllers were able to accelerate several program and payload milestones, including NASA’s PRIME-1 suite, before the lander’s batteries depleted,” Intuitive Machines said in its statement to investors. “With the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge. The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission.”

Despite the setback, Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said during Thursday’s news conference that this second mission has made “considerable strides” since the company’s first mission with Odysseus.

“We’ve traveled over a million kilometers out to the moon,” Altemus said. “We did 39 orbits around the moon in the past 72 hours. That’s essentially operating a data relay satellite in orbit with our own ground station network.…So we made considerable strides since mission one.”

Nicola Fox, associate administrator for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, spoke of the difficulty of landing a spacecraft on the moon on Friday.

“I think we can all agree, particularly today, that landing on the moon is extremely hard,” Fox said. “And Intuitive Machines, too, was aiming to land in a place humanity has not been to before.…We knew going into this mission, as we do going into all of our CLPS [Commercial Lunar Payload Services], that these are very high risk, high reward.

“The risk will always be there since these are experimental missions. It’s kind of a new thing for us as NASA takes an unprecedented step back and we let the U.S. commercial providers take the lead from start to finish on the missions—and we think of ourselves more as a customer on these missions.”

Intuitive Machines said in its statement to investors Friday that the moon’s southern pole region is lit by harsh sun angles and has limited direct communication with Earth.

“This area has been avoided due to its rugged terrain and Intuitive Machines believes the insights and achievements from IM-2 will open this region for further space exploration,” Intuitive Machines said.

Firefly Aerospace, another private aerospace firm based out of Cedar Park, Texas, landed its Blue Ghost on the moon last week and has begun its mission. Another private lander, Resilience from the Japanese firm Ispace, is expected to land in May or June.