Free Republic

Intuitive Machines have successfully soft landed on the Moon, carrying a number of payloads for NASA, this represents a return to the moon for the USA. However far more significantly, it's the first purely commercial lander to land on the surface of the moon, and the first lunar lander to use purely cryogenic propellents for all its deep space maneuvering. Both of these factors are core to NASA's Artemis program, and so seeing success here is important to NASA's plans.However.It's far from a perfect success, because it appears to have fallen over during the landing, and this is limiting the...

VAN HORN, Texas - Even skeptical locals, who've become wary over the years of city slickers with big ideas for their town, perked up when Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos made his pitch — a spaceport for commercial travel into the beyond. Bezos flew into this West Texas town a few weeks ago to tell key leaders how he planned to use his newly acquired 165,000 acres of desolate ranch land. He also gave his only interview so far on the spaceport to the Van Horn Advocate, the weekly newspaper Larry Simpson runs from the back of his Radio Shack store....