Firefly originally intended to develop a spacecraft based on the design of Israel's Beresheet lander, which was the first ...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Landing a spacecraft on the moon has long been a series of hits and misses. The latest casualty came this week after Intuitive Machines put another lander sideways on the ...

The second-ever commercial landing on the moon comes amid a flurry of lunar exploration activity that will see around a dozen missions this year alone ...

One of those came March 2, when the robotic craft built by Cedar Park’s Firefly Aerospace became the first commercial ...

Though the robotic craft, called Athena, performed excellently on its flight to and around the moon, this landing mishap comes a year after Intuitive Machines' first government-supported attempt ...

Unlike NASA's successful Apollo moon landings, which had billions of dollars behind them, private companies operate on a limited budget with robotic craft that must land on their own, said Firefly ...

Although no easy feat, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander descended in a controlled fashion, and without mishap, to the ...

The win comes just four days after Russia’s crash-landing. Japan becomes the fifth country to land successfully on the moon, with its spacecraft touching down in January. The craft lands on the ...

Mission controllers were able to confirm that Athena lunar lander made it to the moon, but they do not know the status of the spacecraft.

Furthermore, there are no GPS systems on the moon to help guide a craft to its landing spot. A combination of gravity and inertia factors seemed to stymie Intuitive Machines' previous landing.

“Y’all stuck the landing. We’re on the moon,” Will Coogan, the lander’s chief engineer, told the control room in suburban Austin after confirming the 330-pound craft was safely on the ...