HOUSTON — History was made Thursday after a private spacecraft made the first U.S. touchdown on the moon in more than 50 years.
The lunar lander was built by Intuitive Machines, an aerospace company headquartered in Houston, Texas.
Intuitive Machines was founded in 2013 by Stephen Altemus, Kam Ghaffarian and Tim Crain.
The company started as a think tank and progressed into a company constructed to provide reliable and safe autonomous system solutions.
“We’re doing that by straying away from and sailing offshore from what is known and what is safe into the unknown and trying to solve those engineering issues,” Altemus told KHOU 11 in 2019. “Going right to the brink before failure. That’s what’s different about this company.”
Intuitive Machines was the second U.S. company to attempt the first moon landing since the Apollo mission. The first was Pittsburgh’s Astrobotic Technology, but it stumbled shortly after liftoff in early January because of a fuel leak. Initiative Machines launched its private lunar into space on Thursday, Feb. 15. It completed a 7-day mission before landing on the moon shortly before 5:30 p.m. CT on Thursday, Feb. 22.
"We were traveling 25,000 miles an hour and we came down, and touched down, at about 6 miles an hour with downrange traverse at 2 miles an hour," Altemus said the day the Intuitive Machines' spacecraft landed on the moon.
Intuitive Machines' private lander is part of a NASA program to kickstart the lunar economy. The space agency is paying $118 million to get its experiments on the moon on this mission.
Only five countries — the U.S., Russia, China, India and Japan — have scored a lunar landing and no private business has yet done so. The U.S. has not returned to the moon's surface since the Apollo program ended more than five decades ago.