Intuitive Machines' Athena space craft declared dead after landing sideways in a crater on the moon

A privately owned robotic lander named Athena is no longer working after it landed sideways in a crater near the moon's south pole on Thursday afternoon.

Officials at the Houston-based Intuitive Machines, which built and flew the spacecraft to the moon, announced Friday morning that the mission is officially over after Athena missed its planned landing mark by over 800 feet and fell over.

“The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission,” the company said in a statement.

This was the second lunar landing attempt for Intuitive Machines in the last year. Athena, a 15-foot-tall robotic spacecraft, is almost identical to Odysseus, another Intuitive Machines lander that touched the moon in February 2024. The first commercially operated spacecraft to land on the moon, Odysseus fell over shortly after landing.

NASA confirmed that Athena touched down on the moon at approximately 12:30 p.m. ET on Thursday. During a 4 p.m. ET press conference, Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said that the team was not sure where Athena landed and that Athena's mission was "off-nominal," an aerospace term for "not-as-expected," meaning the mission might not be fulfilled as originally planned by Intuitive Machines.

Athena was set to land on Mons Mouton, a flat-topped mountain about 100 miles from the moon’s south pole. If it had been successful, Athena's landing would be the closest landing to the south pole to date. Athena also carried a drill for NASA that aimed to pull and analyze lunar soil to see if there is frozen water and other compounds in the area.

Athena was this week's second lunar touchdown for a private U.S. company. SpaceX also tried to launch another mammoth Starship rocket on Thursday but lost contact minutes into the test flight and the spacecraft exploded over Florida, the Associated Press reported.

What was Athena’s mission on the moon?

Athena was expected to deploy a rover called the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP). It’s a four-wheel vehicle, built by Colorado-based Lunar Outpost, that would test cellular communications equipment in the area and work to create a 3D map of the moon’s surface. If all had gone well, MAPP would have been the first American robotic rover on the moon.

“Lunar Voyage 1 is not just about exploration — it’s about proving that private industry can operate, sustain, and create economic value on the moon,” Lunar Outpost CEO Justin Cyrus said in a Feb. 26 statement. “These historic accomplishments create real-world lunar infrastructure, resource utilization, and planetary mobility — essential steps toward a lasting human presence beyond Earth.”

Athena was then supposed to send out a miniature hopper, called Gracie, a small robot designed to search the moon for water.

But one of the most essential parts of Athena was NASA’s PRIME-1 experiment, a drill designed to dig deep into the moon’s surface and search for water ice and analyze soil. According to NASA, this information will “help scientists better understand lunar resources.”

If there is evidence of water, NASA is eager to analyze it in preparation to send more astronauts to the moon as part of the Artemis program, which has a significant goal of training astronauts on the moon as a stepping stone for a mission to send them to Mars.

“The real goal is Mars,” retired NASA astronaut Steven Swanson said about the Artemis program in a 2020 interview. “We will use the moon as a testbed because Mars is a very difficult mission.”

“As well as Mars, we can also use the moon as a testbed for other things — to see how we can actually gather materials from the moon itself and maybe use that to make our fuel,” he added.

This was the 2nd U.S. spacecraft to land on the moon this week

Another Texas-based company, Firefly Aerospace, launched its Blue Ghost lander in January and it landed on the moon Sunday morning. This was Firefly Aerospace’s first trip to the moon, with help from NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

Since landing, Blue Ghost has been sending photos and data from the experiments it’s been conducting on the moon. Similar to Athena’s plans, the spacecraft has collected samples of the lunar soil.