The lander’s choreographed descent was the first for the U.S. since 1972, when Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt left the last bootprints in the desolate gray dust.Intuitive Machines was striving to become the first private business to successfully pull off a lunar landing, a feat achieved by only five countries. Another company gave it a shot last month, but never made it to the moon, and the lander crashed back to Earth.Odysseus, carrying NASA experiments, reached the moon Wednesday, six days after rocketing from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.”The Odysseus spacecraft from the United States successfully landed on the moon on Thursday (local time), becoming the first American spacecraft to achieve the feat in more than 50 years,” ANI reported.With this, Intuitive Machines (IM) — the commercial venture behind the Nova-C lander — has become the first private venture to carry out a successful landing on the lunar surface.This marks the first American soft landing on the lunar surface since the Apollo era in 1972, the news agency said.(With inputs from ANI)
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