American company Houston-based Intuitive Machines has made historic landing by becoming first commercial outfit to put their Odysseus robot on the Moon’s south pole.\\\

Flight director Tim Crain announced “ What we confirm, without a doubt, is our equipment is on the surface of the Moon and we are transmitting”.

Intuitive Machines has broken the Untied States’ 55-year absence from the Moon’s surface, although the US space agency NASA had purchased room on Odysseus for six scientific instruments and its administrator Bill  Nelson said “  the US has returned to Moon, today, for the first time in the history of humanity, a commercial company – an American company- launched and led the voyage up there. And today is the day that shows the power and promise of NASA’s commercial partnerships”.

Controllers had to deal with technical problems even before the descent began as Odysseus’ racing lasers, which are supposed to calculate the craft’s altitude and velocity, weren’t working properly, but some experimental lasers from NASA on board, as the engineers were able to patch these across to the navigation computers.

The Odysseus touched down at 23:23GMT, at the tragetted landing site a terrain next to a 5Km-high mountain complex known as Malapert, the southernmost point on the Moon ever visited by a spacecraft, at 80 degrees South.

The six commercial payloads on board  include a student camera system from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, which should have been deployed from Odysseus  when it was still 30m above the lunar surface. The system was designed to take selfie images as the robot set itself down. American artist Jeff Koons attached a box to the side of the lander that contains 125 small stainless steel balls to represent the Moon’s different phases through a month.