Moon landing: Live reaction to Odysseus transmitting faint signal from lunar surface

Odysseus — a robotic spacecraft that traveled more than 1 million kilometers since launching last week — is now the first American vehicle to land on the lunar surface since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.

Minutes after the Nova-C lander's historic 6:23 p.m. EST Thursday touchdown, Intuitive Machines co-founder and mission director Tim Crain confirmed that crews had detected a "faint signal" from the lander's high-gain antenna.

"We can confirm — without a doubt — that our equipment is on the surface of the moon. And we are transmitting," Crain said.

The announcement spurred applause in the Texas company's mission control room and a roomful of employees, family and friends.

"Houston, Odysseus has found his new home," Crain said.

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After conducting a correction maneuver and adding one additional orbit around the moon earlier Thursday, Intuitive Machines crews guided the lunar lander to seek touchdown near the moon's south pole. Odysseus is carrying a suite of six NASA scientific payloads via the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative and Artemis campaign.

"After troubleshooting communications, flight controllers have confirmed Odysseus is upright and starting to send data. Right now, we are working to downlink the first images from the lunar surface," Intuitive Machines officials said in an 8:25 p.m. tweet.

The groundbreaking lunar lander launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 1:05 a.m. Feb. 15 from pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center.

"A commercial lander named Odysseus, powered by a company called Intuitive Machines, launched upon a SpaceX rocket, carrying a bounty of NASA scientific instruments, and bearing the dream of a new adventure," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a congratulatory post-landing video message.

Nelson called the moon landing "a triumph," saying Odysseus had "aced the landing of a lifetime."

"Today for the first time in more than a half-century, the U.S. has returned to the moon. 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," Nelson said.

Wednesday morning, Intuitive Machines personnel reported that a 408-second main engine burn had placed the lander in a lunar orbit 92 kilometers above the moon's surface, setting the stage for landing.

Rather than targeting moon landings for political purposes, like during the 1960s and '70s, the United States will now seek to establish a long-term human outpost on the moon, former NASA astronaut José Hernández said during a Feb. 1 ballroom speech at SpaceCom in Orlando.

"Everything that we do on the moon, we're going to need to do on Mars," said Hernández, whose life story and 2009 flight aboard space shuttle Discovery on STS-128 were chronicled in the Amazon Studios movie “A Million Miles Away” starring Michael Peña.

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Hernández, a former migrant farm worker, displayed a PowerPoint slide showing the average distance from Earth to Mars measures 588 times farther than the distance between Earth and the moon.

"We've got to prove we're able to survive outside the Earth for long durations of time on the surface of the moon. Because on Mars, that's 140 million miles away. That's a big difference," Hernández said.

"You can't just high-tail it back if you get yourself in trouble," he said.

Now, if all goes according to plan, the robotic lander's instruments will conduct science and data-gathering for about seven days.

"Today’s achievement has not only brought us one step closer to returning humanity to the lunar surface, but it advances our mission to expand economic activity in space," Space Florida President and CEO Rob Long said in a Thursday night press release.

"As we work toward making Florida the premier location for interplanetary aerospace commerce, we will continue to invest in commercially driven opportunities that set the standard for the future and build the world's leading global space transportation network," Long said.

For the latest news from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center, visit floridatoday.com/space.

Rick Neale is a Space Reporter at FLORIDA TODAY (for more of his stories, click here.) Contact Neale at 321-242-3638 or rneale@floridatoday.com. Twitter/X: @RickNeale1

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This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Moon landing: Odysseus touches down, sends faint signal from surface