And the first by a private company. You are watching live on cspan. They started the mission with incredible imagery. Capturing Iconic Images of the earth after separation. This requires a lot of planning, work, and just a hint of luck. They took five quick images every five minutes fro two hours. Out of all of those images, we ended up with just four inspiring ones to show humanitys place in the universe. We are just a little more than 10 minutes away. Lets get the final interview ahead of this critical maneuver. Thank you. I am here with the associate administrator for the science commissioner directory. It is a great day. You are watching this. What is happening in the room right now . Just before the final maneuvers . It is excitement, anticipation. Everybody knows that landing on the moon is hard. We are already celebrating. This mission is already a success. We have taken science data all the way. We are now in lunar orbit. Just a lot of excitement. We have seen these. What does it mean when you look at these challenges in a bold, new way . It is a new way of doing science. It is taking our science and this is a way for us to get more science and technology to the men equally. This is high risk. There is tons of science on the surface. This is exciting. This touches all five of our science divisions. You said high reward. What is that . What does that mean . There is so much we can do on the moon. We know there is water. It is very heavy to carry. We can break it up into hydrogen and oxygen. It is very great for sustainability. Where they are going is one of the oldest regions of the moon. You can actually learn about what our solar system is like. Life is very noisy here on earth. But the moon is very pristine. We can do some amazing science. I look forward to learning more about it. Thank you. This is such an amazing team. Thank you to the people who put the science and Technology Experience on. Thank you to the commercial team that put their instruments on. Thank you to spacex for a beautiful ride to space. It is such an incredible effort. It is a bundle of emotions. I am with you all the way. Thank you for joining us today. Now we are following the fight flight controllers. Thanks for that. There was a maneuver to burn altitude. They are starting to make the requirements needed. We just heard from the flight controller. We are inside of five minutes. This is a critical burn to slow the lateral velocity. For folks at home, we are listening into the live channel. A lot is happening. We are focused on the propulsion elements. The spacecraft is oriented in such a way that it can use navigation to scan the environment along the way. What is happening . We know we needed that navigation when we were descending to a lunar surface. This involves a couple of pieces. A camera and a laser rangefinder. That intuitive machine is not operating. We made the decision for the flight controllers to utilize a couple of the laser beams from the nasa payload. Make the Software Patches required. This is quite the challenge. Just about two hours. We elected to delay the orbit. It appears to be paying off. The last callouts we heard were beginning processing optical images. That was nominal the last time we heard that. That is critical to understanding the performance. They are monitoring every step and all of the data. Exactly what i these folks looking at . Everyone is looking at their assigned screens. All of them are tailormade. A few of them are looking at the same kind of screen. We are still getting ready for this ignition. In just about two minutes. Everyone is looking at their screens and doing their respective jobs and reporting up to the Mission Director. The activity director is keeping in touch with everyone and making sure we are putting this whole thing together. There is a call for tank press started. We heard that they were working on the steps leading toward the power dissent initiation. We expect that to take about 11 minutes. Slowing down to 1800 meters per second. That is required to get this Lunar Landing opportunity in just a few minutes. 90 seconds until we begin that maneuver. It is about an 11 minute burn that will slow down the spacecraft. A lot will happen after that 10 minutes. This is a single continuous burn. After that we will see a lot of events in rapid session. We just heard another call out saying that the feedline prep is complete. That is the propulsion system. That feedline is prepped. Ready to blend the two propellants. We are attracting that in just under a minute. Verging on burnout the two. The lander is getting into the correct position. Another call for feedline prep in preparation for this burn. 15 seconds, exec mode. We are attracting a little less than a minute. Ignition. Main stage. There we heard mainstage ignition. That is coming from our prop council. Good control. These are great callouts in between our prop council and our flight manager calling it as the data is feeding into the lander. We are continuing to have good communications. That is why we have this. That is why we have the lunar lander. This is the step you want to be in. We are tracking progress along with the public. These are the conditions necessary for a soft landing. We did have a few questions come in regarding how much gas to slow down the vehicle. This goes and just about 90 on time. In order to make a decision. If they need to slow down more and make a decision to have a safe landing, they are able to add a little bit more power and make it a possibility. 500 kilometers to target. That is the Mission Director calling about 500 kilometers. That is part of the reason were are showing is animation. Not enough bandwidth to do a livestream. That gives you an idea of the vehicles attitude. That gives you an idea of what is happening over these critical 10 minutes. Bringing that acceleration down to about 1800 meters per second. There are a few more steps after that. This is where we start getting a little tricky with the final approach. It may add a few seconds or some time but we are intended to land at 5 24 p. M. Central time. There is some giveandtake. We are training for a little bit of loss of communication during this process. That communication is absolutely important. For the autonomous operations. 400 seconds to go. That was the call we were waiting for. Getting those images processed. Figure out a patch while we were in lunar orbit. 400 seconds remaining. These are excellent calls to hear. This will allow them to make decisions to scan the landing site beneath it. Make the decision in an area that calculates the terrain to make sure it is landing in a safe landing zone. We have to use that hazard relative navigation, a critical tool in order to land on the moon. There are no humanized or elements human eyes or elements. This all happens autonomously. This is a great callouts. Hearing about the camera system and processing those images. We expect pdi to go until about 5 22. Or about 300 seconds. It is very precise. After those critical maneuvers, 90 thrust, we will hear those callouts periodically. That is a great callout. A couple of things. What we have not mentioned so far in the show is that the delian night pressurizes that liquid methane. It is used for reaction control. Those are the small sports spurts that control the vehicles attitude. If you really want to land at the right attitude, your intent is are facing back to the right line of sight to earth so you can get that ultimate confirmation. The antenna alignment is an important element of landing on the moon. We are expecting the intended to be pointed toward earth to confirm, but there may be a delay. We are expecting some kind of delay. I was talking about quickly we could receive that confirmation. There was some dispute about how long the earliest would be. Just about 15 seconds after we sell timing of the event. Right now we are tracking about 5 24 p. M. Central standard time. May be a few minutes after that while we work to acquire the signal. The lander is going to a general area. Nine kilometers altitude call. This is the general area we want you to fly to. To make better decisions about this. This is an area with the least amount of slope. It is free of boulders and other obstacles. It is making a thomas decisions about where to go. Three minutes call. When the lander is making those decisions, it is also very difficult to track area we have been very fortunate thus far tracking communications to this point. Three minutes brings us just shy of 5 22 p. M. Central time. We should hear about the initiation burn is complete. Then we will begin the next series of maneuvers. That starts with the pitch over. We did go into this burn expecting pitch over. Good call out on the timing of that maneuver. It is important to remember that pdi starts an engine bearing that does not stop until landing. We lit the engine. We are changing into a pitch over. That is a throttle down to the lunar surface. When we get out of pdi, everything after that will happen in very quick succession. The time it takes to go from pitch over to landing or what we estimate landing to be. Looking maybe at 90 seconds is what we fact. There is some wiggle room. That sets us on little after 5 23 p. M. Central time. The autonomous operations, this is exactly what we got relayed before the start of this. We are right on track. Excellent call out. The flight controllers are working so hard to make sure it is working. Pulling in to resources that were not earlier planned for. It appears like that solution is working. The people working to patch that software was certainly under pressure. The clock was ticking as he went into that extra lunar orbit. We could not to sit in orbit trying to solve our problems. It is sounding good so far. Two minutes to touchdown. That required a patch to be created on the ground. To confirm that the laser sensors are relative to the train navigation. Standing by to see if we can get an altitude reading. From the flight dynamics officer. Confirmed, that looked like it pitch over. It sounds like we have some data that confirms pitch over. This starts the hda process of hazard protection. You have heard us talking about the problem that was attempted to be solved in lunar orbit. Making the decisions of decision to postpone the show. 1000 meter callout. That is coming from flight management. Ndl was not intended to be the primary landing system on this. We are using a couple of laser beams and feeding them into the hazard detection and avoidance system you see on your screen right now. The lander is making autonomous decisions about where once you land. Less than one minute remaining for touchdown. Again, that is the time of touchdown. It may take some time to can earn the status of the lander. We do have a deployment trying to take the third person images going down to the neuner service service. We are within one minute. We are willing to go down. We are attracting here in the broadcast booth. The clock has reached the expected. The expected time of landing. Now is the process of waiting for collins comms. We are in standby mode. One minute has elapsed. We are getting the ground stations locked on. We expect that to come from ground that or net or comm. Not happening on the public channel that we have access to. We are standing by to hear that come through the channels. Almost two minutes since we estimated the landing time. We got a couple of callouts saying there was about a two minute forgiveness in our timetables. Checking antenna reception. We are standing by just as we approach 5 26 p. M. Central standard time. There is a flexibility between what we were attracting. Please go back to your logs and confirmed the last information you have. That is the Mission Director. We talked about the communication outages. The lander making the toughest decisions. This is the process of going through the last bit of data that came into control and working to verify, where was the lander possibly going . How do we look for it and establish those communications . They use for antennas placed at the top of the lander that are designed to capture these communications. We didnt expect this. We talked about it. This is a communications challenge. Right now we are standing by to hear the communications callout. Just a little more than three minutes from the time of when the clock reached 04 landing on the moon. We just checked with our team in the broadcast booth. Lets stay on this. All of the chatter, we are not hearing on this public channel. We are trying to solve a possible communications challenge in this moment so we will continue standby. For those following along go for prime. Called the room looking for states. We will cycle the ground transmitter and do some sweeps, is that your plan . That is correct. That is just what we had in mind in our notes. If we encounter a communications challenge, it is difficult to land on the moon and continually have those communications. What you heard was folks talking about using the earth station limited in the u. K. To do a sweep, looking for the signal. Via thomas process of the lander reassigning itself somewhere it believes is safe. The camera was functioning and able to make those decisions. A twohour orbit of problemsolving with Intuitive Machines. The laser range finders installed inside the navigation pods. The laser range finders not activated. We went to nasa and asked to use two of the laser beams on the navigation doppler lidar. It spent two hours in orbit. We will confirm with our antenna. Spent about two hours in orbit to solve the problem. We got good readings on the way down. We are working to confirm communications on the surface of the moon. That is the southpaw region of the moon. What we do know is the power, we were following along. We executed a pitch over maneuver and we are counting down the clock to a landing time of 5 23 p. M. Central time. Josh describe the processes of working on the Communications Component to confirm data from the lander to check the status of novac and the data they were receiving at novac control to confirm landing. Part of that is communications. We are standing by. I am looking at our last part of the flight. It looks like we had excellent control throughout. I did see a little bit of a roll extrusion. We landed off angle in the final phase. I do see up to an eight degree extrusion. We are about to begin the role maneuver. Terminal phase, a large roll maneuver. Until that point, we were really solid. Terminal phase begins at 30 meters. We are posthda. 400 meters. That is a great conversation confirming we are good. It was a good confirmation, the process we were very familiar with, talking about the attitude of the lander, making sure antennas are in direct line of sight with earth ground stations on earth, excuse me. Mission director, stations are updating to make sure they are tuned in. There is the call, searching for the communications back to the ground station. This one is in the u. K. , tracking us. It is important to note we have an entire Network Dedicated to working these communications problems. It has been active this entire mission. The largest, most powerful dish is about 64 meters in australia. The time to search with an opportunity with the largest, most powerful dish, we are looking at 1213 hours after our estimated touch down. We could be searching for the lander signal for confirmation for quite some time. We will continue to listen in and standby as lead controllers or working with Ground Control in the United Kingdom to work this problem. It is another challenge. Similar to the challenge solved just to make it this far. We have a return signal we are tracking. We have an onboard system for communications but after 15 minutes with lack of communication, we will power cycled the radios. After that, for another 15 minutes, we will switch antennas. We have some time to evaluate. We do have a signal we are tracking. We will see what happens. That was a great call out about the Autonomous Systems installed in our novac class called odysseus. It is similar to what we were preparing for at aos to where the lander has systems in place to recycle antennas. That was similar to what we thought we would need to do after acquisition of signal when we were separated from the second stage of the launch vehicle. If we made it to a certain point, the lander was autonomously programmed to take it into its own hands. We are not dead yet. We are also not dead yet. [laughter] the key here, josh, is patience. It is 5 34 p. M. Confirming it could take two phases of 15 minute increments to confirm the landing. We will standby and monitor as nova control continues to work the issue. Tense moments inside Mission Control with the most qualified folks. Picking up a signal from our high gain antenna and transmitter. It is there, but it is faint. Standby, folks. We will continue to stand by. Lets keep the camera on inside nova control. I want to send commands to reactivate, make sure we are transmitting. We are Still Standing by. The last call from the Mission Director was we were getting a faint signal from odysseus high gain antenna. All stations, this is Mission Director on im1. We are dialing in the point. We can confirm without a doubt that our equipment is on the surface of the moon and we are transmitting. Congratulations, im team. We will see how much more we can get. [applause] an excellent call from our Mission Director. If i could just pass on a few words to the entire team at Intuitive Machines and here in the Mission Control, and outstanding effort. I know this was a nailbiter but we are on the surface and we are transmitting. Welcome to the moon. Houston, odysseus has an excellent call. This is our team of Intuitive Machines mechanics and their families, friends, everyone who has dedicated so much to make it this far. How about that call, gary . That was something else. A faint signal. Now it is time to work on refining that signal. Our Mission Director today making the call, odysseus has a new home. It shows disciplines of the flight controllers in nova control. He waited until there was absolute confirmation that there was a signal and that is when they took a moment to celebrate. It was not just the individuals in nova control that contributed to the mission. The contributions to enable the success of novacs landing on the moon stretches far and wide. We showed some of the folks watching but really it extends further than this. A wonderful and truly amazing moment to celebrate. The u. S. Has landed on