The first private spacecraft to land on the Moon arrived sideways. Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander, built in Houston and launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in February 2024, touched down near the lunar south pole with one of its legs caught on a rock. It tipped. The solar panels that needed to face the sun faced mostly sideways. The antenna alignment was degraded. By most engineering metrics, this was a significant malfunction.
And yet: it was the first American spacecraft to soft-land on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. The instruments functioned. Data was collected. NASA, which had paid Intuitive Machines roughly $118 million for the delivery, called it a success with caveats. In the messy, underfunded, technically demanding world of commercial lunar delivery, a lander that tips over and still returns science data is, by the standards of the field, something close to a win.
The CLPS model and its theory of change
NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, launched in 2018, represents a deliberate departure from the agency's traditional approach to planetary missions. Rather than designing and operating its own landers, NASA contracts with private companies to deliver science payloads to the lunar surface. The agency pays for delivery, not for the spacecraft itself. Companies bear the technical and financial risk; NASA bears the cost of losing science instruments if the lander fails.
The logic behind this approach is that sustained commercial activity at the Moon will drive down costs and develop industrial capacity that NASA alone cannot sustain. If companies are competing to deliver payloads, and they fly frequently enough to iterate on their designs, the cost per kilogram to the lunar surface should fall the same way launch costs fell as SpaceX drove competition in the orbital launch market. That is the theory. The practice has been more turbulent.
Peregrine and the propulsion anomaly
Astrobotic's Peregrine Mission One launched in January 2024, eight days before Odysseus. It never reached the Moon. A propulsion system anomaly — a failed valve that caused a critical oxidizer leak — meant the spacecraft could not achieve the trajectory corrections required for lunar landing. The mission was terminated; Peregrine reentered Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. It carried NASA payloads including water ice prospecting sensors intended for lunar south pole characterization. All of that science was lost.
Astrobotic's technical post-mortems have been unusually transparent by aerospace standards. The company identified the failure mode in detail and has used the findings to redesign propulsion architecture for its larger Griffin lander, which is under development for a future CLPS task order. Whether that iterative improvement model — fail, diagnose, redesign — is how commercial lunar development was supposed to work, or whether it represents a deviation from what NASA expected when it structured CLPS, is a question the agency has not publicly resolved.
ispace and the 2023 Hakuto-R crash
The Japanese startup ispace preceded both Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic with its own lunar attempt. In April 2023, its Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander completed a successful five-month journey to lunar orbit before crashing during final descent. The cause was a software navigation error: the lander's altitude sensor misread a large crater rim as flat terrain, causing the system to believe it was already close to the surface and cut engine thrust too early. The spacecraft fell from altitude and destroyed itself on impact.
ispace flew a second mission in 2024 as a secondary payload and is developing a mission 3 lander with upgraded guidance software and a European partner. The company has remained solvent and technically active, a meaningful achievement for a startup attempting one of the most technically demanding commercial missions possible.
What the scoreboard means
The current record for commercial lunar landings is roughly one partial success (Odysseus), two mission failures (Peregrine, Hakuto-R M1), and several more missions in development. That is not the record of an industry that has solved lunar landing. But it is the record of an industry that is learning — faster, arguably, than NASA's own programs moved at equivalent development stages.
The more significant near-term question is what payload economics will look like if reliability improves. NASA's current CLPS task orders pay rates that, per kilogram, are higher than they would be for a mature commercial service, because the agency is partly subsidizing the development of new industrial capability. If commercial landers reach reliability levels comparable to launch vehicles — around 95% mission success rates — the price per kilogram will fall and payloads that cannot currently justify the cost of custom NASA missions become commercially viable.
That future is not here yet. But the infrastructure is being built, mission by mission, crash by crash, each failure adding to a growing body of engineering knowledge about what it actually takes to land softly on a body with no atmosphere, a surface covered in abrasive regolith, and temperature swings that destroy instruments not specifically hardened for them.
