The United States has successfully pulled off its first lunar landing in over fifty years with a spacecraft built and operated by a Texas-based private company, Africa Today News, New York reports.
Odysseus, an uncrewed robot lander built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines with funding from NASA, touched down near the lunar south pole at around 23:23 GMT, the company according to an announcement by the company in a webcast on Thursday.
The successful landing came on the heels of a tense final descent during which flight controllers had to switch to an untested landing system after a problem arose with the spacecraft’s autonomous navigation system.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson described the landing as a “triumph for humanity” and a “new adventure in science, innovation and American leadership in space”.
“Today, for the first time in half a century, the US has returned to the Moon,” Nelson said in a video posted on social media.
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“Today for the first time in the history of humanity, a commercial company, an American company, launched and led the voyage up there. And today is a day that shows the power and promise of NASA’s commercial partnerships.”
Intuitive Machines’ mission, the first successful lunar landing by a private firm, follows a failed bid by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology last month that ended with its lander crashing back to Earth.
Africa Today News, New York reports that the last time a US spacecraft landed on the moon was sometime in 1972 when Apollo 17 brought astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt to the lunar surface.
Only four countries apart from the US have successfully landed on the moon.
Japan last month became the fifth country to achieve the feat when it landed its so-called “Moon Sniper” spacecraft on the lunar surface, following in the footsteps of the former Soviet Union, China and India.
Odysseus launched from Florida on February 15 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.