US completes first touchdown in 50 years

A spaceship attempting America's first Moon landing in more than 50 years began its descent to the surface Thursday. 

This first commercial US spaceship is a part of a new fleet of NASA-funded, uncrewed commercial robots intended to pave the way for astronaut missions later this decade. It is built by the Houston-based Intuitive Machines. The uncrewed six-legged robot lander, dubbed Odysseus, touched down at about 6:23 p.m. EST.

The current mission "will be one of the first forays into the South pole to actually look at the environmental conditions to a place we're going to be sending our astronauts in the future," said senior NASA official Joel Kearns. Thursday's landing represented the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a U.S. spacecraft since Apollo 17 in 1972.