Athena Makes It to the Moon, but Uncertainties Remain

By Gayoung Lee edited by Lee Billings

Athena, a commercially built spacecraft that is loaded with cutting-edge technology and science experiments, has landed on the moon. But mission controllers at Intuitive Machines, the company that built and operates the spacecraft, have yet to confirm its exact status, although the available data as of this writing suggests Athena is still operational.

If and when Intuitive Machines can conclusively declare that Athena has reached the moon in good health, it will have joined Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, another commercial lander that made its moonfall on Sunday—upping the tally of active U.S. lunar surface missions to two. The back-to-back feats are considered important precursors to future crewed missions to the moon under NASA’s ambitious Artemis program.

Unlike Blue Ghost’s 45-day voyage to the moon, Athena’s lasted for little more than a week. The spacecraft launched on February 26 and entered lunar orbit on March 3. From there it orbited the moon for about three days (while sending back live beauty shots). It then started its descent from orbit for landing early in the morning on March 6. And at 12:15 P.M. EST, Athena began its final maneuvers toward the surface, a process that was initially expected to last for around 15 minutes. While most of the landing procedures unfolded without issue, no decisive announcements were made about the state of the vehicle as of 12:31 P.M. EST, which was when it was supposed to land. For the next 20 minutes, the mission room bustled with activity as scientists—and Intuitive Machines’ CEO Steve Altemus—joined operators in trying to figure out what was happening.

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“We can confirm Athena is on the surface of the moon,” declared Intuitive Machines’ communication director Josh Marshall, somewhat tersely, at around 12:52 P.M. EST, 20 minutes after the intended touchdown time, during a livestream of the landing attempt. “We are working to figure out the orientation of the vehicle, which is important because those are our antenna systems that will determine how much signal we’re going to have” and when data about the exact condition of Athena will be available.

The livestream, held at Intuitive Machines’ facility near NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, ended abruptly without a conclusive declaration of Athena’s overall health.

In some ways, the landing attempt was a chance at redemption for Intuitive Machines after Odysseus, Athena’s predecessor, suffered a skewed lunar touchdown that hindered its surface operations. Until further data can be confirmed, Intuitive Machines will be hoping Athena will evade meeting similar fate. Merely by reaching the surface, however, Athena has already brought humanity the closest we’ve ever been to the resource-rich lunar south pole—specifically, to Mons Mouton, a plateau that may be a landing spot for future Artemis astronauts as well.

Assuming that Athena functions normally after its landing, it will deploy a particularly rich array of technology demonstrations. For instance, NASA’s PRIME-1 (Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1) is a two-part instrument consisting of a drill and a mass spectrometer that will chemically analyze samples of lunar soil to search for the water ice and other volatile substances thought to exist in abundance in the crater-pocked terrain of the lunar south pole. Once such reservoirs have been scouted out, subsequent missions might potentially mine them for manufacturing potable water, breathable air and even potent rocket fuel. And then there’s the Micro Nova Hopper, also developed by Intuitive Machines with NASA funding, which will seek to demonstrate a new mode of lunar locomotion with a series of incremental hops toward a nearby 20-meter-deep, permanently shadowed crater.

Other payloads include Nokia’s Lunar Surface Communications System (LSCS), which uses a 4G/LTE system to establish a cellular network between each element of the mission, and a laser retroreflector array (LRA), a small device for accurately pinpointing Athena’s location on the lunar surface. These payloads, like the lander they rode to the moon, reflect an extensive partnership between NASA and private industry under the space agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

For the next 10 days, both Athena and Blue Ghost are planned to operate around the clock at their respective locations: Athena is near the south pole, and Blue Ghost is around Mare Crisium, a crater on the moon’s northeastern near side. The landers will also be there during a total lunar eclipse, as seen from Earth, as the moon passes through our planet’s shadow and gains a bloodred glow on the night of March 13 and the early morning of March 14.

Despite the setbacks in establishing communications, Athena may be considered the third successful lunar landing of NASA’s CLPS initiative. (The first CLPS mission, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, suffered a propellant leak after its January 2024 launch that prevented it from reaching the moon at all.) In all, CLPS has booked $2.6 billion for various payloads and launches through 2028, each intended to incrementally progress U.S. readiness for a crewed lunar return. Currently, 14 different companies have been selected by NASA to deliver different payloads of science and technology experiments to the moon. For example, some of Blue Ghost’s payloads are demonstrating how to clean hardware caked in hazardous moon dust and how to run radiation-hardened computers on the lunar surface.

“With each CLPS mission, the United States is leading the way in expanding our reach and refining our capabilities, turning what was once dreams into reality,” said NASA acting Administrator Janet Petro in a press release that immediately followed Athena’s departure from Earth.

The U.S. is not alone, however, in its commercial efforts to rekindle lunar exploration. Japan’s Resilience lunar lander, built by the private company ispace, launched alongside Blue Ghost in January but is taking a much slower trajectory toward its destination. This launch marked a first in spaceflight history: never before had three landers been simultaneously bound for the moon. Meanwhile other nations—most notably China—continue their own programs of lunar exploration, with an eye toward independent human landings there.

Besides NASA’s sheer spending power, another key factor behind the sudden spate of moon landings is the private sector’s greater agility compared with the space agency’s generally slower process of mission development. Odysseus, for instance, left for the moon only about a year prior to Athena, giving Intuitive Machines little time to troubleshoot what went wrong with Odysseus’s landing to prevent similar issues from befalling Athena. Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace alike will each have about the same amount of time to respectively prepare for IM-3 and Blue Ghost Mission 2, missions that will involve the successors to their currently active spacecraft on the moon. The fact that the teams behind Athena and Blue Ghost managed to turn around technological revisions so quickly is an impressive feat, given the increasingly heated competition between the U.S. and China to take the lead in this 21st-century moon race.

“These science and technology demonstrations are more than payloads—they represent the foundation for future explorers who will live and work on the moon,” Petro said in NASA’s recent press release. “By partnering with American industry, we are driving innovation, strengthening our leadership in space, and preparing for sending humans farther into the solar system, including Mars.”