A Houston-based company has landed America’s first spaceship on the Moon in more than 50 years, part of a new fleet of NASA-funded, uncrewed commercial robots intended to pave the way for astronaut missions later this decade.

But while flight controllers confirmed they had received a faint signal, it was not immediately clear whether Odysseus, the lander built by Intuitive Machines, was fully functional, with announcers on a live stream suggesting it may have come down off-kilter.

The hexagon-shaped vessel touched down near the lunar south pole at 2323 GMT, having slowed from 4,000 miles (6,500 kilometers) per hour.

Images from an external “EagleCam” that was supposed to shoot out from the spacecraft during its final seconds of descent could be released.

For the time being, however, nothing is certain. 

“Without a doubt our equipment is on the surface of the Moon and we are transmitting,” said Tim Crain, the company’s chief technology officer. “So congratulations IM team, we’ll see how much more we can get from that.”

A previous moonshot by another American company last month ended in failure, raising the stakes to demonstrate that private industry has what it takes to repeat a feat last achieved by US space agency NASA during its manned Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

The current mission “will be one of the first forays into the south pole to actually look at the environmental conditions to a place we’re going to be sending our astronauts in the future,” said senior NASA official Joel Kearns.

“What type of dust or dirt is there, how hot or cold does it get, what’s the radiation environment? These are all things you’d really like to know before you send the first human explorers.”

Lunar south pole

Odysseus launched February 15 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and boasts a new type of supercooled liquid oxygen, liquid methane propulsion system that allowed it to race through space in quick time.

Its landing site, Malapert A, is an impact crater 300 kilometers (180 miles) from the lunar south pole.

NASA hopes to eventually build a long-term presence and harvest ice there for both drinking water and rocket fuel under Artemis, its flagship Moon-to-Mars program.

Instruments carried on Odysseus include cameras to investigate how the lunar surface changes as a result of the engine plume from a spaceship, and a device to analyze clouds of charged dust particles that hang over the surface at twilight as a result of solar radiation.

It also carries a NASA landing system that fires laser pulses, measuring the time taken for the signal to return and its change in frequency to precisely judge the spacecraft’s velocity and distance from the surface, to avoid a catastrophic impact.

This instrument was meant to run as a demonstration only, but Odysseus eventually had to rely on it for the entire descent phase of its journey, after its own navigation system stopped working — forcing controllers to upload a software patch to make the switch.

Exclusive club

The rest of the cargo was paid for by Intuitive Machines’ private clients, and includes 125 stainless steel mini Moons by the artist Jeff Koons.

There’s also an archive created by a nonprofit whose goal is to leave backups of human knowledge across the solar system.

NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to ship its hardware under a new initiative called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), which it created to delegate cargo services to the private sector to achieve savings and stimulate a wider lunar economy.

The first CLPS mission, by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, launched in January, but its Peregrine spacecraft sprung a fuel leak and was eventually brought back to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

Spaceships landing on the Moon must navigate treacherous boulders and craters and, absent an atmosphere to support parachutes, must rely on thrusters to control their descent. Roughly half of the more than 50 attempts have failed.

Until now, only the space agencies of the Soviet Union, United States, China, India and Japan have accomplished the feat, making for an exclusive club.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

The Congress, on a roll after sealing seat sharing deals with Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party and Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, is aiming for a hat-trick, with a new formula for Mamata Banerjee. Sources said the party is hoping to get five of Bengal’s 42 seats. The downside – as in deals with AAP and SP — the Congress may have to part with seats in states where it is the main Opposition. This could involve two seats in Assam and one in Meghalaya.

But for now, the good news is the talks are back on, and moving in a positive direction, sources in the Congress said. “If consensus is reached, an announcement will be made soon,” they added.

The party, though, is still pushing for one more seat in Bengal – which is four more than Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee’s last offer.

For the Congress, this is a big scaling down. The party had started with eight to 14 seats and then slowly lowered the figure. But it was its insistence on six seats that had provoked the fiery Chief Minister, who in no uncertain terms, told the Congress not to over-reach.

“I told Congress ‘You don’t have a single MLA here, I am offering two MP seats and we will ensure you win in those two seats.’ They said ‘No, we want more seats’. I said, ‘Now I’m not going to give a single seat’,” Ms. Banerjee had said at a meeting in Malda earlier this month.

Then, for good measure, she added that she was putting her membership of the INDIA bloc on hold and would review the matter after the election, depending on the result.

Sources said the Congress is hoping to settle for the seats the BJP currently holds – one of them in BJP bastion north Bengal. This are apart from the ones Mamata Banerjee had offered – Berhampore and Malda South that it won in 2019.

Seats that Congress wishes to fight and Trinamool might give them are Behrampur, Malda South, Malda North, Raiganj and Darjeeling. The Congress also wants Purulia but seems unlikely.

Party sources indicated that Trinamool does not realistically expect to win back the north Bengal seats, despite their public posturing.

Over the last few days, the Congress has been rapidly finalizing the deals that had been on ice, with the intervention of its Central leadership.

Reaching out personally to Akhilesh Yadav, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has accepted the SP’s 17-seat offer in Uttar Pradesh. And today, following a meeting at Rahul Gandhi’s residence, attended by party chief Mallikarjun Kharge and others, sources said the broad contours of seat sharing with AAP have been decided.

In Delhi, where AAP is in power, it will contest four seats and the Congress three. In return, the Congress will cede two seats in Gujarat and one seat in Haryana to AAP. In both states, the Congress is the main Opposition party. In Goa, AAP will give one seat to the Congress.

Bharat Rashtra Samithi MLA Lasya Nandita died today in a tragic road accident in Hyderabad. The 37-year-old, who was a first-time MLA, suffered serious injuries after her vehicle lost control and collided with the road divider.

Lasya Nandita was rushed to the hospital immediately after the accident, and later died at the hospital. The driver involved in the crash is reported to be critically injured and is currently receiving medical treatment.

Just ten days ago, Lasya had survived another accident in Narkatpally where she sustained minor injuries. On February 13, while she was on her way to Nalgonda to attend a rally by the Chief Minister, an accident occurred, resulting in the death of her home guard.

Lasya Nandita, a prominent figure in the political landscape, had previously served as a corporator from Kavadiguda since 2016.

Born in 1986 in Hyderabad, Lasya Nandita made her foray into politics around a decade ago. She served as a corporator in the Kavadiguda ward before being elected as MLA from Secunderabad Cantonment in the 2023 Telangana assembly elections.

Senior BRS leader KT Rama Rao took to X (formerly Twitter) to express his condolences at Nandita’s sudden death. The driver involved in the crash is reported to be critically injured and is currently receiving medical treatment.

After her father’s death last year, Lasya was entrusted with the responsibility of carrying forward his legacy. In the November 2023 elections, she secured a victory after being nominated as the party’s candidate.