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An uncrewed American lander that became the first private spacecraft on the Moon has met its end after failing to “wake up,” the company that built it said.
Houston-based Intuitive Machines said late Saturday that the lander, named Odysseus, had not called home this week when its solar panels were projected to receive enough sunlight to power its radio.
The lander landed at an unstable angle on February 22, but was still able to complete several tests and send back photographs before its mission was determined to have ended a week later, when it entered a week-long lunar night.
Intuitive Machines hoped it could “wake up” once it received sunlight again, as the Japanese SLIM spacecraft, which landed upside down in January, did last month.
The company said Saturday on X, formerly Twitter, that after several days of waiting, operators had confirmed that the lander’s power system, nicknamed “Odie,” “would not complete another call home.”
“This confirms that Odie has permanently vanished after cementing its legacy in history as the first commercial lunar lander to land on the Moon,” he said.
The mission has been hailed as a success by Intuitive Machines and NASA, even as it ran into multiple problems along the way, including a rollover during landing.
It was also the first lunar landing by a US spacecraft since the manned Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
NASA plans to return astronauts to the moon later this decade. It paid Intuitive Machines about $120 million for the mission as part of an initiative to delegate cargo missions to the private sector and stimulate a lunar economy.
Odysseus carried a suite of NASA instruments designed to improve scientific understanding of the lunar south pole, where the space agency plans to send astronauts under its Artemis program later this decade.
Intuitive Machines has two more lunar missions planned this year, both part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which works with the private sector.
The United States, along with its international partners, wants to eventually develop long-term habitats in the region, harvesting polar ice for drinking water and producing rocket fuel for future trips to Mars.