Joking aside, it's still pretty impressive. Landing on the moon is not easy. They landed softly, and the payloads are healthy, so overall I'd consider it a win.
Not precisely defense, and perhaps a bit too credible, but I thought some folks here might enjoy this. Feel free to remove if it doesn't fit the community. Cheers!
There have been a several lunar landing attempts recently. ispace (🇯🇵) crashed, Roscosmos (🇷🇺) crashed, ISRO (🇮🇳) landed upright, Astrobotic (🇺🇲) didn't make it to the moon, JAXA (🇯🇵) landed upsidedown, and now Intuitive Machines (🇺🇲) landed sideways. Moon landings are difficult.
How did they land 2 big ugly bags of mostly water on it, complete with golf clubs and a small car, without flipping, then get them back into lunar orbit? It seems like the deep pool of engineering expertise has dried up somewhat over the decades. Was it just luck and vast amounts of money relative to GDP?
Using the USA flag for Intuitive Machines is a tad disingenuous, they're not a public US arm that represents the nation and it's people, they're just a private for profit company, same as Amazon or McDonalds.
They don't care what country they're in, they just go where they think they can make the most money. Right now they think that's the USA.
They're more than happy to cash in on American pride and nostalgia by slapping a bunch of flags all over their corporate space equipment and trying to spin this as "The first American moon landings since Apollo", haha.
The Japanese one somehow landed upside down, literally upside down, engine pointing up, undamaged from the landing! Now that's impressive!
One of its thruster bells broke off during final descent causing a loss of that thrust which threw the whole thing out of whack, it corrected admirably but landed upside down haha.
Such a weird cool turn of events. Space is so cool.