This year’s hot destination is the moon. Two landers built by private companies just touched down on the moon within a week of each other. One landed softly and safely — a first for any private spacecraft — while the other did not.
A robotic lander named Athena, built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, attempted to land on March 6 but ended up on its side in a crater, the team reported March 7.
“With the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge” its batteries, the company reported in a statement on its website March 7. “The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission.”
Just days earlier on March 2, the Blue Ghost lander from Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace touched down safely. After a long journey in space — having launched on January 15 — Blue Ghost landed in a volcanic plain on the nearside of the moon called Mare Crisium at 3:34 a.m. EST. It is the first privately built lander to touch down on the moon without crashing or tipping over.
“The path to the stars is no longer limited to nations alone,” said Jesus Charles, director of spacecraft operations at Texas-based Firefly Aerospace. “Blue Ghost’s successful landing proves commercial industry has a critical role in humanity’s journey beyond Earth.”
But as NASA associate administrator Nicky Fox said a few days later in a March 6 NASA news briefing when Athena’s status was still in doubt, “I think we can all agree, particularly today, that landing on the moon is extremely hard.” Athena “was aiming to land in a place that humanity has not been to before.”
Athena targeted a flat-topped mountain near the moon’s south pole called Mons Mouton, which is believed to be older than the surrounding terrain. The lander missed its intended landing site by 250 meters. That put Athena inside of a crater, where it was too dark and cold to recharge the lander’s batteries, and tilted on its side.
“We don’t believe we’re in the correct attitude with respect to the surface of the moon, yet again,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said in the NASA news briefing March 6. Pictures downloaded later confirmed it.
It may have felt like déjà vu.
In February 2024, Intuitive Machines’ first lander, Odysseus, broke a leg upon landing and fell on its side. A lander called Peregrine from the Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic launched in January 2024 but never made it to the moon. And a lander called Beresheet from an Israeli nonprofit called SpaceIL crashed into the moon in 2019.
Both Blue Ghost and Athena are part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program, a public-private partnership started in 2018. As part of that program, NASA contracted private companies to send suites of science experiments and technology demonstrations to the moon.
Many of these experiments are designed to pave the way for future human missions. For instance, Intuitive Machines’ Athena carried a NASA drill and spectrometer to hunt for water ice, which previous missions have shown is abundant at the south pole. It also had brought two rovers and a hopping robot named Grace, after the pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, which aimed to take data from inside on of the south pole’s permanently shadowed craters. The company was also working with Nokia to test a 4G cellular network on the moon between the hopper and the main spacecraft. Those experiments now can’t run as planned.
Blue Ghost carries an instrument to measure the stickiness of lunar dust, which can damage equipment and threaten astronauts’ health, as well as a prototype dust shield. The lander’s instruments will also test lunar drilling technology, a new method for soil sample collection, computers that are hardened against harmful space radiation and a GPS-like system for the moon.
NASA and Firefly chose Mare Crisium for Blue Ghost’s landing site due to low levels of magnetic activity compared to other parts of the moon. Earth’s magnetic field is driven by an internal molten core and covers the whole planet. But the moon lacks a molten core, leading to variations in its magnetic field from place to place. Some of Blue Ghost’s instruments will take magnetic field measurements, so the team selected a spot where the moon’s own magnetism would not interfere.
If all goes well, Blue Ghost will observe a total eclipse on March 14. While viewers on Earth will witness a lunar eclipse, as the planet’s shadow passes over the moon, the lander will see a solar eclipse from another world as Earth blocks the sun.
Blue Ghost also plans to capture images of the lunar sunset on March 16 and collect data on a horizon glow caused by levitating lunar dust, first observed by the Apollo 17 astronauts. The lander will operate throughout a lunar day, or about two weeks on Earth, until it gets too dark and cold on the moon for it to continue working.
The CLPS companies regard each other as “competimates,” a mashup of “competitor” and “teammate,” says Firefly engineer Kevin Scholtes. “We’re in this pool together, and there’s a very real quality of, all ships rise with the tide,” he says. “Ultimately, we want each other to be successful.”
This is just the beginning of a parade of private lunar landers. Thirteen American companies are part of the CLPS program, with moon missions planned through 2028. “The goal is to land all over the place,” NASA’s Fox said.
Another lander, called Resilience from Japanese company ispace, launched with Blue Ghost in January but won’t land until May. And a commercial company in China called STAR.VISION plans to launch two small lunar exploration robots with the country’s Chang’e-8 mission in 2028 — the first time China’s national space agency will work with a private company.
Landing plans
NASA is collaborating with several private companies to send missions to the moon over the next several years. The current plans include:
- Intuitive Machines IM-3, to land in a lunar swirl called Reiner Gamma
- Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1, which landed in Mare Crisium on March 2, 2025
- Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 3, aiming for volcanic mounds called the Gruithuisen Domes
- Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 2, to land on the lunar farside
- Team Draper, to land in the Schrödinger Basin near the lunar south pole
- Intuitive Machines IM-1, which landed near the south pole in 2024 and tipped over
- Astrobotic Griffin Mission-1, aiming for the south pole
- Intuitive Machines IM-4, aiming for Mons Mouton — the same spot as IM-2
- Intuitive Machines IM-2, landed on Mons Mouton on March 6 but wound up tipped over in a crater
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