It’s been 18,700 days since the U.S. last made a soft landing on the moon.

That’s when the Apollo 17 lunar lander Challenger touched down in the valley of Taurus-Littrow bringing astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on the final visit to the moon of the Apollo program.

The duo arrived on Dec. 11, 1972 and left three days later. The U.S. has not returned for a soft landing to the surface of the moon since.

Today, that 52-year drought could end with what could be the first successful commercial lunar landing in history. Houston-based Intuitive Machines is aiming to send its Nova-C lunar lander named Odysseus for a target moon touchdown of 4:24 p.m. EST, which is an update from the original 5:49 p.m. plan after an overnight lunar correction maneuver.

NASA and the company will begin coverage of the attempt beginning at 3 p.m. Streams can be found on NASA’s social media platforms including youtube.com/@NASA/ and on its NASA TV website as well as on the Intuitive Machines’ website at intuitivemachines.com/im-1 and on its X account at X.com/Int_Machines/.

The spacecraft launched from from KSC on Feb. 15 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9, successfully entering lunar orbit at an altitude of about 57 miles on Wednesday. The plans are for the lander to first drop to about 6 miles altitude with another burn on the far side of the moon before the final descent.

Earlier this week, the company posted images from Odysseus’ journey to the moon showing Earth in the background. Its trip to the moon has been more successful than fellow commercial company Astrobotic Technology’s attempt that launched in January, which suffered a propellant leak that forced the company to send its Peregrine lunar lander back to Earth to burn up on reentry.

Intuitive Machines successfully transmitted its first IM-1 mission images to Earth on February 16, 2024. The images were captured shortly after separation from @SpaceX‘s second stage on Intuitive Machines’ first journey to the Moon under @NASA‘s CLPS initiative. pic.twitter.com/9LccL6q5tF

— Intuitive Machines (@Int_Machines) February 17, 2024

The Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines launches were the first two under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Lander Services (CLPS) program, an effort by NASA to encourage private companies to succeed so NASA could become a customer for future supply and science missions as opposed to running the whole mission. It has seven more CLPS contracts slated so far including up to three more this year.

NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million for the mission, and Odysseus is carrying six NASA science payloads worth about $12 million as well as another six payloads the company organized on its own. The landing location will allow for eight to nine days of activity before the lunar day ends, after which NASA doesn’t expect to get more data from its payloads because of the harsh conditions when the temperature drops out of the sun.

The payloads will help NASA’s efforts to eventually bring human missions to the moon’s south pole as well, currently the goal of the Artemis III mission as early as September 2026.

 

If Odysseus’ landing is successful, it would become the first commercial lunar lander to safely reach the moon’s surface following Astrobotic’s misfire in January and two private companies from Israel and Japan that failed in previous years.

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Less than half of all lunar soft landing attempts have been successful, although both India and Japan managed to stick landings on government missions in the last several months. Those two countries joined the U.S., Soviet Union and China as only five countries to achieve a soft landing on the moon.

The commercial lunar economy NASA is seeking to spark with its CLPS program will allow it to focus on its human Artemis missions. Artemis II, which will send the first humans back to moon, only to fly around it, is slated for as early as September 2025 with the more complicated Artemis III mission that aims to return humans, including the first woman, to the lunar surface slated for one year later as early as September 2026.

So far only 12 men from six Apollo missions from 1969-1972 have walked on the moon.