Enlarge / Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander is shown shortly before touching down on the Moon. (credit: Intuitive Machines)

Steve Altemus beamed with pride on Tuesday morning as he led me into Mission Control for the Odysseus lander, which is currently operating on the Moon and returning valuable scientific data to Earth. A team of about a dozen operators sat behind consoles, attempting to reset a visual processing unit onboard the lunar lander, one of their last, best chances to deploy a small camera that would snap a photo of Odysseus in action.

"I just wanted you to see the team," he said.

The founder and chief executive of Intuitive Machines, which for a few days this month has been the epicenter of the spaceflight universe after landing the first commercial vehicle on the Moon, invited me to the company's nerve center in Houston to set some things straight.

Enlarge / India's Chandrayaan 3 lander stands about 2 meters, or a little more than 6 feet, in height. (credit: ISRO )

India's Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft is setting up for a final descent to the surface of the Moon on Wednesday, four days after Russia's Luna 25 lander cratered following a botched engine burn.

If all goes according to plan, the Chandrayaan 3 lander—named Vikram—will settle softly onto the lunar surface at 8:34 am EDT (12:34 UTC) Wednesday, redeeming India's failed landing attempt on the Chandrayaan 2 mission in 2019.

But for the last 47 years, reaching the Moon's surface in one piece has proven to be an impossible task for any landing craft that wasn't built in China. Since 2013, China has racked up three successful landings with its robotic space missions, including the first controlled touchdown on the Moon's far side and an ambitious sample return mission in 2020 .

Enlarge / India's Chandrayaan-3 lunar spacecraft undergoes accoustic testing. (credit: ISRO)

As anyone who has been paying attention to space exploration knows, the Moon is red-hot. Up to half a dozen missions may launch to the lunar surface in the next six months, heralding a new era of Moon exploration.

It has not always been so. Following the Space Race in the 1960s and early 1970s, NASA and the Soviet Union backed off their Moon exploration programs. NASA sent probes to the far-flung corners of the Solar System, and the US space agency and Russian space program focused their human activities in low-Earth orbit, constructing and inhabiting a series of space stations.

There have been three primary drivers of renewed interest in the Moon. The first was the discovery and confirmation in the 1990s and early 2000s that water ice is likely to exist at the lunar poles in permanently shadowed craters. The presence of abundant water, providing oxygen and hydrogen resources, has given space agencies a new reason to explore the poles.