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Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space . My belly is still in knot from the Intuitive Machines land livestream . I think it ’s fairish to say that the word of Tim Crain , Intuitive Machines ’ CTO , will go down in chronicle : “ We ’re not stagnant yet . ”
Very alloy .
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Story of the week
For the first metre since 1972,American hardware is on the moon . Intuitive Machines ’ first lander , called Odysseus , softly advert down on the south perch part of the moon around 5:23 p.m. Central Time on Thursday , bring to a faithful an eight - day journey and days of hard work .
There was a brief geological period after land when foreign mission controller waited to reestablish communication with the spacecraft . Then a faint signal was discover .
“ What we can confirm without a doubt is that our equipment is on the surface of the moon and we are transmitting , ” Crain say shortly after the signal was discover . “ So felicitation IM team , we ’ll see how much more we can get from that . ”
“ Houston , Odysseus has regain its new nursing home , ” he lend .
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The troupe laterconfirmed on the social medium siteX that Odysseus was “ alive and well . ”
Intuitive Machines is not the only entity celebrating . The mission is also a huge succeeder for NASA , which pay Intuitive Machines around $ 118 million to deliver six scientific and research payloads , under a program address Commercial Lunar Payload Services .
Exclusive of the week
Hadrian , a company that is automating high - preciseness CNC machining , closed a $ 117 million Series B , in a mixture of equity and debt , with new participation from RTX Ventures , the venture weapon of defense prime RTX ( formerly called Raytheon ) .
The unexampled funding will aid the company double its software and mechanization teams , break ground on a second factory in the third quarter and much , much more .
“ We ’ve get under one’s skin a lot to do in the next two age , but very grateful that in a very hard fundraising surroundings that new investors and existing investors and industry players like Raytheon are stepping up to the home and give us the capital that we necessitate to keep up with the customer need , ” Hadrian CEO Chris Power said .
What we’re reading
Last week , I really enjoyed reading“Why It Took the US 51 year to Get Back on the Moon”by Bloomberg ’s Loren Grush .
I hear thisa lotfrom people that do n’t closely follow the space industry . It ’s always some variance of , “ We did it in the 70s , why ca n’t we seem to do it now , with such melioration in software , compute , robotics , materials , et cetera et cetera ? ”
The next fourth dimension you encounter such a query , place them Grush ’s history .
“ We say we ’ve been there before , but these companies have n’t been there before , ” said planetary physicist Philip Metzger . “ It is really novel engineering science that ’s being hone and senesce right now . ”
This week in space history
OnFebruary 25 , 1969,NASA launched Mariner 6 , a massive spacecraft designed to image the surface of Mars .
Five months after launching , the 840 - pound spacecraft made it to the ruby planet . The ballistic capsule ( along with its twin , Mariner 7 , which launched a calendar month later on ) enamor data on Mars ’ atm and surface , and relayed slews of photographs back to Earth .
