An unmanned commercial robot, funded by NASA, has made history by landing on the Moon for the first time since the Apollo era. This will open the door for US astronauts to return to Earth’s neighbor later this decade.

After a nerve-wracking final descent that required flight controllers to switch to an experimental landing system and took several minutes to establish radio contact with the lander after it came to rest, Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus, built in Houston, touched down close to the lunar south pole on Thursday at 2323 GMT.

“Today, for the first time in more than half a century, the US has returned to the Moon,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a video. “Today, for the first time in the history of humanity, a commercial company, an American company, launched and led the voyage up there.”

A member of the team that built the spacecraft told AFP that images from an external “EagleCam” intended to shoot out from it during its last seconds of descent might be released early on Friday.

“After troubleshooting communications, flight controllers have confirmed Odysseus is upright and starting to send data,” Intuitive Machines said in its latest update on X. “Right now, we are working to downlink the first images from the lunar surface.”

The stakes were raised to show that private industry had what it took to replicate a feat last accomplished by US space agency NASA during its manned Apollo 17 mission in 1972 after a previous moonshot attempt by another American company last month failed.

Lunar south pole

To highlight the technological difficulties, Odysseus flew the last part of the journey with an experimental laser guidance system created by NASA, intended only as a technology demonstration, after the onboard navigation system malfunctioned.

It was expected that confirmation of the landing would come shortly after the milestone, but instead, announcers speculated for almost fifteen minutes about whether the craft had landed “off angle.”

Finally, the company’s chief technology officer Tim Crain confirmed “our equipment is on the surface of the Moon and we are transmitting,” as applause broke out in mission control.

Odysseus touched down in Malapert A, an impact crater 300 kilometers (180 miles) from the lunar south pole.

NASA hopes to eventually build a long-term presence and harvest polar ice for both drinking water and rocket fuel for an onward journey to Mars under Artemis, its flagship program.

The current mission is “one of the first forays into the south pole to actually look at the environmental conditions to a place we’re going to be sending our astronauts in the future,” said senior NASA official Joel Kearns.