Business
Intuitive Machines’ Athena Lander Is on the Moon, but Its Fate Is Unclear
Athena didn’t crash. But what did happen to it?
Hours after the 15-foot-tall robotic spacecraft arrived at the moon’s surface, closer to the lunar south pole than any spacecraft has been, it remained unclear whether its touchdown was smooth enough to perform its intended work, or if it toppled over in the process, potentially limiting the mission’s scientific achievements.
“We’re trying to evaluate exactly what happened in that last bit,” Tim Crain, the chief technology officer of Intuitive Machines, said at a news conference.
The spacecraft is almost identical to Odysseus, the lander that the company sent to the moon last year. Odysseus was the first commercially operated vehicle to successfully land on the moon. But that success came with an asterisk when the vehicle toppled shortly after reaching the ground.
It appears that might have happened again.
At a post-landing news conference, Steve Altemus, the chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said the spacecraft had sent back conflicting data about whether it was standing upright or tipped over. But a sensor known as an inertial measurement unit offered a perhaps convincing clue that Athena was on its side.
As it headed to the lunar surface, laser instruments that measured the lander’s altitude were providing noisy data, which may have contributed to the botched landing.
Until that final descent, Athena had performed much more smoothly than the Odysseus lander a year ago, said Dr. Crain of Intuitive Machines. “We were expecting a fully successful landing,” he said.
Mr. Altemus said it was too soon to determine how much of the planned mission could still be salvaged. Athena’s payloads include a drill, three small rovers and a rocket-powered hopping drone.
“When we get that full assessment, we will then work closely with NASA science and technology groups to identify science objectives that are the highest priority,” Mr. Altemus said. “And then we’ll figure out what the mission profile will look like.”
The spacecraft is not generating as much power as it should, probably because the solar panels are not pointed in the correct direction.
Images from cameras on the spacecraft will help Intuitive Machines figure out the orientation of the spacecraft. Dr. Crain said the spacecraft probably set down outside of the planned landing zone but was confident it was still somewhere on Mons Mouton, a high plateau near the south pole that Athena was to explore.
Images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which will pass over the landing site, could pinpoint Athena’s precise location.
It has been a busy week in spaceflight and on the moon. Intuitive Machines was the second company to reach the lunar surface this week, after Firefly Aerospace, another Texas space company, successfully reached the Mare Crisium region of the moon on Sunday morning.
“Any time humanity puts a lander on the moon, it’s a good day,” Dr. Crain said.
The main customer of both missions is NASA under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which hires private companies to take NASA-financed science and technology payloads to the lunar surface. The NASA contract for this mission is worth up to $62.5 million, but Intuitive Machines may not be paid the full amount.
Shares of Intuitive Machines, which trades under the name LUNR after going public in 2023, tumbled after reports of the spacecraft’s problems. Its stock fell 20 percent on Thursday.
The main payload on Athena is a drill for NASA that will extract lunar soil to be sniffed by a mass spectrometer for frozen water and other compounds. NASA officials said it might be possible for the drill to work, even if the spacecraft was not vertical. “It doesn’t have to be directly where I can drill straight down,” said Clayton Turner, the associate administrator for NASA’s space technology mission director. “There are other options we can use, too.”
Also aboard is a rover the size of a small dog that will test a Nokia cellphone network on the moon, and two smaller rovers, one built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the other by a Japanese company. Intuitive Machines also planned to test a rocket-powered vehicle called a hopper that could explore places not easily reached by rovers.
A parade of lunar landers is expected to continue through the rest of the year.
One of those spacecraft is already in space. The Resilience lander from Ispace of Japan was launched on the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that sent Firefly’s Blue Ghost on its way. But it is taking a longer, more fuel-efficient path to the moon. It will enter orbit around the moon around May 6 and try a landing a month later at Mare Frigoris, or the Sea of Cold, in the moon’s northern hemisphere.
In the fall, Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh is planning to try to get to the moon flying a large lander known as Griffin that will carry a commercial rover designed by Venturi Astrolab of Hawthorne, Calif., among other cargo.
The most intriguing lander is the one planned by Blue Origin, the rocket company started by Jeff Bezos. The lander, known as Blue Moon Mark 1, will be the largest spacecraft ever to set down on the moon, even larger than the ones that took NASA astronauts to the moon during the Apollo moon landings more than 50 years ago.
Danielle Kaye contributed reporting.
A big rig crossed the center divider on the 210 Freeway in Irwindale on Saturday morning, killing one and injuring 30, authorities said.
The mass accident took place before 9 a.m. west of Irwindale Avenue, where emergency personnel arrived to find the truck had collided with several vehicles, the Los Angeles County Fire Department said in a social media post.
One person was pronounced dead at the scene and two were critically injured. Eight minors were taken to the hospital and 22 other crash victims declined treatment, the department said.
The California Highway Patrol temporarily shut down all westbound lanes of the freeway, diverting traffic onto Irwindale Avenue, before opening up one lane.
The CHP issued a SigAlert warning of traffic delays on the westbound lanes, with two lanes on the eastbound side of the freeway also temporarily closed.
The cause of the crash is under investigation.
Ford Motor Co. is suing a prominent Los Angeles lemon law firm for allegedly inflating their fees by as much as 7,000%, the company’s latest attempt to crack down on California attorneys who it says are exploiting the state’s unique law to protect consumers from defective cars.
Quill & Arrow, a personal injury firm that represents drivers suing over so-called “lemons” — vehicles with significant, unfixable manufacturing flaws — has long been a thorn in the side of Ford. Since 2021, Ford said its has paid them more than $100 million, roughly half in attorney fees.
That profit, Ford alleges in a federal lawsuit filed Thursday, came from billing records that were “utter fabrications.”
Quill & Arrow used an overseas “army” of low-paid, non-lawyers to help file thousands of lemon lawsuits and then pretended the work was done by California attorneys, who billed as much as $950 per hour, Ford alleged in its complaint.
Ford claims that the bulk of the work was actually done by non-lawyers in countries such as Mexico and the Philippines, who got paid as little as $13 per hour.
Quill & Arrow was founded in 2019 by attorneys Kevin Jacobson and Jonathan Shirian, according to the firm’s website, which touts recovering $500 million in lemon law payouts. The partners called Ford’s lawsuit “nothing more than an attempt to silence firms who would dare to hold them responsible and seek justice for consumers.”
“It grossly mischaracterizes the facts and the claim that Quill & Arrow created fabricated attorney billing records is absurd,” the firm said in a statement.
California’s lemon law, considered one of the strongest consumer protections in the nation, allows drivers to get a refund or replacement of a broken car if the manufacturer can’t fix it. If the driver is not satisfied, they can sue.
If the driver wins, the law allows attorneys to collect their fees from the car maker — rather than take a percentage of the client’s winnings, as is common in personal injury cases. This fee structure, Ford argues, has turned the law into a bonanza for plaintiff attorneys. The longer the case drags on, the company argues, the more the law firm can reap in profit.
Ford alleges the firm intentionally slowed down its clients’ cases to drive up their billable hours, instructing drivers not to communicate with Ford and pushing them toward filing a lawsuit.
“California’s Lemon Laws are in need of reform and the courts need to exercise more oversight, given the fraud we continue to expose,” said Doug Lampe, counsel at Ford, in a statement. The law is “being blatantly abused by the lemon law plaintiffs lawyers, the bar is not policing its own and the courts need to monitor fee awards with far more skepticism and scrutiny.”
The cases, he said, “have become about the lawyers for the lawyers.”
Lemon law cases have exploded in California in the last decade from about 4,500 cases in 2015 to roughly 30,000 in 2024, according to an analysis from the Assembly Judiciary. These cases, officials warned, “are poised to cripple the entirety of California’s civil justice system.”
In 2024, the legislature tightened the state’s lemon law, requiring additional steps before a driver could sue. The bill seems to have put little dent in the caseload: Lemon lawsuits surged to record levels the following year.
Ford’s lawsuit marks the second attempt by one of America’s largest car manufacturers to go on the offense against lemon law attorneys in Southern California.
Ford sued a cohort of local lemon law firms in May 2025, accusing attorneys of collecting at least $100 million in “phantom legal fees” by billing for hours they never worked. The case, which was brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, alleged lawyers worked together to file a flurry of fraudulent cases with billable hours that defied logic.
A partner at Knight Law Group, an L.A.-based lemon law firm, once billed an “ostensibly heroic but physically impossible” 57.5-hour workday, Ford alleged.
Knight Law Group denied inflating their billing, calling the suit a “thinly veiled attempt to silence firms who would dare to hold them responsible and seek justice for consumers.”
A judge threw out the suit in March on the grounds that lawyers were protected under the 1st Amendment from being sued for the content of their lawsuits unless the case was proved fraudulent. Ford says it plans to appeal.
After Quill found about the Knight Law Group case, Ford alleged, Quill dedicated a team to “scrubbing” their own timesheets of “impossible time entries.”
Ranch dressing is having a moment thanks to the World Cup and Kraft is ready to meet it.
The company said Thursday that it is working on a “TSA Compliant Ranch” for those looking to travel with the quintessentially American condiment. The announcement follows the influx of social media videos showing international soccer fans sampling the dressing for the first time.
“Some visitors leave with souvenirs. Others leave with America’s favorite dressing,” Kraft wrote in a caption accompanying an AI image of a TSA-approved clear bag packed with ranch dressing packets posted to social media. The image showed the bag — complete with a luggage tag resembling a ranch dressing bottle — placed in an airport security screening bin along with other travel essentials.
Additional details will be announced later, the company said.
TSA has also leaned into ranch’s apparent newfound popularity among international travelers, providing some helpful tips (and warnings) on social media.
“If you’re visiting for a very large sporting event & you happen to discover RANCH while you’re here… pls pack it in your CHECKED BAG on your way home,” the agency posted on Instagram Tuesday. It also asked travelers to “avoid chugging your ranch outside security” lines.
“Who knew dip-lomacy could be achieved through addressing the obvious: ranch is the king of condiments,” TSA wrote in the caption accompanying its carousel of humorous ranch-related quips. “If you’re traveling within the U.S., make sure to keep your carry-on sauces to 3.4 oz or less and place any larger containers in your checked bags.”
“Some heroes wear capes. Others bring ranch,” it added.
According to 1987 Times reports, ranch dressing was invented by Steve Henson, who opened the Hidden Valley Guest Ranch in Santa Barbara in the mid-1950s with his wife, Gayle. The unnamed condiment originally mixed herbs and spices with buttermilk and mayonnaise and its popularity with guests led to it being jarred so they could take some home. The more travel-friendly powdered form followed.
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