I had the NASA stream open in a tiny window in the corner of my second monitor Thursday evening, mostly ignoring it while I finished up some invoicing, and then around 6:11pm ET the room full of engineers in Houston went so quiet you could hear someone's chair squeak. That was the moment I actually started paying attention.
The lander is called Odysseus (everyone's calling it "Odie," which I'm into), built by a company called Intuitive Machines that most people, myself included until about three weeks ago, had never heard of. It launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 out of Kennedy Space Center on February 15th at 1:05am, and Thursday night it was supposed to touch down near the lunar south pole, in a crater called Malapert A. No American spacecraft has landed on the moon, soft or otherwise, since Apollo 17 in December 1972. Fifty-two years. And this time it wasn't NASA flying the thing, it was a private company that until this mission had never put anything on another world.
So the plan was: engines fire, lander descends, and at some point signal drops out because the antenna geometry gets weird right before touchdown. Expected. Normal. Except the drop-out lasted a lot longer than the timeline said it should, and you could watch it on the faces of the flight controllers on stream. Nobody was smiling. Somebody near the back of the room had their hands folded like they were praying, which, fair. I found myself standing up from my desk, which is a thing I never do for a livestream.
It took what felt like forever but was actually about six or seven minutes for them to confirm they had a signal and the lander was down and transmitting. The room erupted. I may have said "oh thank god" out loud to an empty apartment, which is a little embarrassing to admit but this is a blog I've been writing since 2011 so at this point you all know exactly how big a nerd I am about this stuff.
Here's the thing that's been nagging at me since. A lot of the headlines Friday morning just said "US returns to the moon" or some version of that, full stop, like it was a clean win, and by Friday there were already murmurs (nothing confirmed as I'm writing this Saturday) that Odysseus might have come down a little harder than planned, maybe caught a footpad on the terrain and ended up resting at an angle instead of sitting perfectly upright. It's still sending data either way, which is the actual headline as far as I'm concerned. A six-legged robot the size of a phone booth flew nearly a million miles, autonomously picked its landing spot because the primary laser system failed and they had to patch in a NASA experimental one mid-flight, and stuck it well enough to talk to Earth. That's not a footnote. That IS the story. But "moon landing, mostly, an experimental laser saved it at the last second, also it might be sitting a bit crooked" doesn't fit in a push notification, so it got flattened into something tidier than what actually happened.
I grew up on grainy Apollo footage my dad had on VHS, rewound so many times the tape had that warbly stretched-out sound in a couple of spots. Watching a scrappy Houston company thread the needle on a shoestring compared to Apollo-era budgets hit differently than I expected it to. Not better, not worse, just different, in the way that a kid's first bike ride hits different from watching someone win the Tour de France.
Anyway. I'm not a space blog and I don't want to pretend I suddenly am one, but this felt worth fifteen minutes at midnight to actually write up instead of just retweeting. Back to the regular chaos of everything else happening in tech right now, of which there is, as always, way too much.