Fifty-plus years after NASA’s last mission to the Moon, Houston is returning to space missions. But this time the sender is not the government agency that deals with space exploration, but a private American company, Intuitive Machines, which is sending instructions to an unmanned craft the size of a phone booth, Odysseus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The spacecraft made an agonizing descent to the lunar surface on Thursday, February 22, with a last-minute software fix to compensate for malfunctioning navigation sensors. One of the spacecraft’s legs hooked onto the surface and the entire craft flipped over, landing on its side. But then again: It was the first time an American spacecraft had landed on the moon in more than 50 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The mission is the latest event in what has turned into the busiest decade in lunar exploration since the 1960s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Huge interest<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Government agencies and private companies in the United States, China, India, Japan, Israel and the United Arab Emirates have sent lunar landers over the past five years, with varying degrees of success. Many more missions, both unmanned and manned, are in the works. The US, the only country to have sent humans to the Moon so far, aims to repeat the feat as early as 2026 and then begin establishing a permanent presence on the surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All this activity is pushing humanity to a new frontier. Today’s plethora of missions to the Moon is poised to define the next 50 years of human space travel. In the 1970s, after the triumph of the moon landings, NASA and the Soviet Union moved away from the moon and focused on building space shuttles and stations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the state of lunar exploration has changed dramatically since Apollo. And this time, instead of returning to Earth again, humanity has the opportunity to launch itself deeper into the solar system, further establishing us as a space-faring, possibly interplanetary, species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n