Goodnight, Odysseus... Thanks for Putting My Message on the Moon!

Intuitive Machines

Happy Leap Day, everyone! Just thought I'd share these images that were released by Intuitive Machines this week as its Odysseus ('Odie') lunar lander was put to sleep due to low battery power today...nevertheless completing the successful seven-day IM-1 mission.

This mission was very significant to me. To NASA, this was the United States' first landing on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. To the burgeoning commercial space industry, this was the first privately-built spacecraft to successfully touch down on the lunar surface.

And to myself, Odie's accomplishment marked the conclusion of me waiting around 15 years for a lander mission to come along that would put my virtual presence on the surface of the Moon! NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter—which bears a microchip containing my name as well as those of 1.6 million other people—has been revolving around Earth's natural satellite since June of 2009.

But it wouldn't be till IM-1 this month that my dream of looking up at the Moon and thinking about how I had a presence intact on its surface, courtesy of a Lunagram message (shown at the very bottom of this Blog entry) that I submitted to a company named Lunaprise back on Christmas Day of 2020, became a reality.

Much thanks to Intuitive Machines, NASA (whose Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative for the Artemis program made IM-1 a reality), SpaceX (which flawlessly launched Odie to the Moon on February 15), Lunaprise and the Arch Mission Foundation (which helped provide the NanoFiche disc that contains Lunagrams as well as the Arch Mission's Lunar Library) for giving me the opportunity to be a part of this historic endeavor!

There are other Moon-bound spacecraft, such as NASA's VIPER rover and Firefly's Blue Ghost lander, that will hopefully bring my presence to other locales on the lunar surface over the next two years. But it will be Odysseus, just like NASA's Phoenix lander (which was the first robotic probe to land my name on Mars back in 2008), that will be the lunar explorer I'm most fond of.

Ad Lunam.


Intuitive Machines


SpaceX




Intuitive Machines