Premiere: Successful satellite landing for a private company's space probe

Returning to the moon has been a goal of the last decade for several states. The American company Intuitive Machines made history by becoming the first private company to successfully send a space probe to the moon, the successful landing last week being the first for the US since the Apollo 17 flight 51 years ago. The space probe, dubbed Odysseus, has landed near the Moon's South Pole, where scientists hope there may be a source of water. The space module traveled 384,400 km from Earth after taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The startup Intuitive Machines received a contract from NASA to carry six scientific instruments aboard the shuttle that will help study the surface of the Moon and measure radio waves. The Houston-based company hopes to send another spacecraft in March that will drill to find underground ice. Odysseus also carries 125 tiny sculptures by American artist Jeff Koons. He hopes that they will be the first works of art to reach the lunar surface. "What a triumph," exclaimed Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, in a post-landing message. "Odysseus conquered the Moon. This feat represents a giant step forward for all of mankind," he commented, using the words of the first man to walk on the Moon more than half a century ago. "Today, for the first time in more than half a century, the United States returned to the moon. Today, for the first time in human history, a commercial company, an American company, launched and led the journey there. And today it's a day that shows the strength and promise of NASA's commercial partnerships. Congratulations to everyone involved in this big and bold mission from Intuitive Machines, SpaceX and right here at NASA," said Nelson, quoted by The Guardian. Nicknamed "Odie" or IM-1, the module sits on the lunar surface and transmits, said Houston-based Intuitive Machines, the company that developed the spacecraft.Odie's journey to the moon is designed to assess the lunar environment at the moon's south pole, ahead of NASA's current plan to send a manned mission there in late 2026. The success comes after a failed US landing mission last month, when the Peregrine spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere while en route to Earth 10 days later. India and Japan recently managed to land their own probes on the Moon, but with the help of their national space agencies, becoming the fourth and fifth countries respectively to do so, after the Soviet Union, the United States and China. But several companies - Israeli, Japanese and American - have so far failed to reproduce the same performance. Russia also missed a module landing last summer.