Intuitive Machines have successfully soft landed on the Moon, carrying a number of payloads for NASA, this represents a return to the moon for the USA.
However far more significantly, it’s the first purely commercial lander to land on the surface of the moon, and the first lunar lander to use purely cryogenic propellents for all its deep space maneuvering.
Both of these factors are core to NASA’s Artemis program, and so seeing success here is important to NASA’s plans. However. It’s far from a perfect success, because it appears to have fallen over during the landing, and this is limiting the communications with the Earth, it’s not clear how much science will be possible with the lunar surface payloads, but at least 3 of the payloads already contributed directly to the success of the landing.
The model I used in animations is by IronManElonMusk for Juno New Origins https://www.simplerockets.com/c/y29Fg…