NASA launch daring project ahead of landmark Artemis mission to land humans on the Moon for the first time in 54 years

We're once again shooting for the Moon, and while it's been 54 years since humans last stepped foot on its rocky surface, Intuitive Machines once again hopes to put a lunar lander up there.

Eugene Cernan has the honor of being the last man on the Moon, serving as part of the Apollo 17 crew in 1972.

Although attempts to explore the celestial body have died down between the Luna 24 probe (1976) and China's Chang'e 3 rover (2013), there have been plenty of uncrewed crashes between.

Following a successful launch and landing of its Odysseus Nova-C lunar lander in 2024, Intuitive Machines is hoping to strike it lucky with the launch of IM-2.

Hopefully launching on February 26, the Athena lander will blast off from the Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

This will mark three lunar landers heading toward the Moon, with Athena following IM-1's legacy as the first soft lunar landing by a private company.

As IM-1 was the first American-made spacecraft to soft-land on the Moon since 1972, its successor is something of a big deal.

Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus cheered the mission and said: "Humanity has never witnessed three lunar landers enroute to the Moon at the same time, and Athena is ready to rise to the occasion.

"This profound opportunity to make history isn’t solely built on technology – it’s established through the relentless dedication of our people, who have turned the Company's words about a reliable cadence of lunar missions into action."

Athena follows in the footsteps of Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost and Japan's ispace RESILIENCE launching on January 15, with the former due to land on March 2 and the latter going the long way around to make it there at sometime in April. As for Athena, it's penciled in for a tentative landing date of March 6.

Athena hopes to uncover lunar water ice, carrying a drone that will attempt to provide the first measurement of hydrogen in the permanently shadowed region (PSR). Later in 2025, the IM-3 mission is planned to conduct experiments on the unexpected magnetic field that has been uncovered near the Reiner Gamma swirl.

Referring to Odysseus short-lived mission before it lost power on February 29, 2024, Intuitive Machines' senior vice president of space systems Trent Martin told Space.com: "We ended up on our side, and we weren't able to use our large, high-gain antenna to send data back to the Earth.

"This time, hopefully, we land in a more precise position."

With things destined to get a little packed on the Moon, it all comes ahead of NASA's plans to put humans back up there as part of the Artemis III mission. Intuitive Machines is providing unmanned craft as part of the Artemis program, where NASA looks to follow on from the Artemis I launching with robots and mannequins aboard in November 2022. Artemis II is scheduled to perform a flyby and send the first manned crew beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in April 2026. The big one is Artemis III, with NASA expected to launch no earlier than mid-2027 due to issues with the heat shield and life support systems on its Orion craft.