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The company reached the lunar surface in 2024, and now its second lander aims to improve on the feat. Three other spacecraft are also flying on the SpaceX rocket.
Feb. 26, 2025Updated 7:28 p.m. ET
Intuitive Machines landed a robot on the moon last year. Can the Houston company do it again, but keep the spacecraft upright this time?
The company’s second lander, named Athena, launched on Wednesday evening on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will attempt a landing on March 6. The spacecraft’s destination is Mons Mouton, a region about 100 miles from the moon’s south pole. That will be closer to the south pole than any previous spacecraft has landed.
When Intuitive Machines’ first lander, Odysseus, set down on the moon in February last year, it managed to communicate with Earth even though it had toppled on its side. It was the first commercially operated lander to reach the moon’s surface, and the first American vehicle to land softly on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The main payload on Athena is a drill for NASA as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Paying a commercial company like Intuitive Machines to take something to the moon is cheaper for NASA than designing and building its own spacecraft.
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The drill is designed to dig about three feet below the surface, pulling up lunar soil about four inches at a time and dropping it onto a pile on the surface. An instrument known as a mass spectrometer will then sniff around the drilled material for compounds like frozen water that easily transform into gases.
