“We can confirm, without a doubt, our equipment is on the surface of the Moon and we are transmitting.
I know this was a nail-biter, but we are on the surface and, uh, welcome to the Moon!”

These were the words spoken by scientists and engineers on February 22nd as they celebrated a historic moment.

For the first time in over 50 years, an American spacecraft had landed on the Moon. Odysseus is a lunar lander, a vehicle designed to travel to, and land on, the Moon.

Unlike the spacecraft that first took humans to the Moon, Odysseus was not built by engineers at NASA, but by a company called Intuitive Machines—making it the first privately owned spacecraft to touch down on the Moon.

And there wasn’t even an astronaut on board to fly it. Instead, a team on Earth programmed the steps Odysseus would need to take to reach the Moon’s surface.

The team at Intuitive Machines worked with NASA to create and fly a vehicle that could take six pieces of the space agency’s scientific equipment to the Moon. Like cameras to discover more about how dust on the Moon’s surface moves when a vehicle lands there. Plus a gauge that helps calculate the amount of fuel in the lunar lander’s tanks. This can be difficult because the force of gravity is not as strong on the Moon as it is on Earth.

Information from these devices and others on board will help NASA to plan for missions that take humans back to the moon.

It took over 3 years to build Odysseus, but on February 15th it finally launched into space on top of a huge rocket. When it was 223 kilometers above the Earth, the lunar lander separated from the rocket and continued its mission to the Moon.

One of Odysseus’ cameras on the outside of the spacecraft sent back some pretty impressive selfies during the journey. Then, when it began to orbit the moon—or travel around it—it took these.

This was taken just six miles away from the Moon’s surface, and shows a large crater near Odysseus’ planned landing site. Although Odysseus’ landing on the 22nd of February was a historic moment, it didn’t go completely to plan. It was supposed to land upright, but data has revealed that the spacecraft ended up on its side after damaging one of its legs, possibly on the edge of a crater.

However, this hasn’t stopped the scientific equipment that Odysseus was carrying from sending valuable information back to Earth, which NASA is already beginning to look at as they plan the next steps in sending humans back to the Moon, where this history-making spacecraft will remain.

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