Image Credits: Cate Dingley/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images
Andrew Ng is stepping down from his role as CEO at Landing AI, the computer vision platform he founded in 2017. Dan Maloney, formerly the COO, will take the reins as Ng transitions to executive chairman to “continue to help drive” the tech and collaborate on “key decisions.”
Formerly of Google Brain, Coursera, and Baidu, Ng has seldom stayed put for long, and it’s probably not a coincidence that his AI Fund just announced plans to raise another $120 million. Chances are Ng — who was appointed to Amazon’s board in April — is simply choosing to focus on investing for now. At the same time, these executive reshufflings often precede other, bigger news, so we’ll be watching for more news from Ng over the coming months.
Image Credits: Intuitive Machines (opens in a new window)
Intuitive Machines has landed a spacecraft on the lunar surface, in a historic first for a private company.
Flight controllers confirmed the landing at 5:23 p.m. CST, though the exact condition of the spacecraft is unclear as engineers work to refine their signal with the lander.
“What we can confirm without a doubt is that our equipment is on the surface of the moon and we are transmitting,” mission director and Intuitive Machines CTO Tim Crain said. “So congratulations IM team, we’ll see how much more we can get from that.”
“Houston, Odysseus has found its new home,” he added.
“What an outstanding effort,” CEO Steve Altemus said after the landing. “I know this was a nail biter but we are on the surface and we are transmitting. Welcome to the moon.”
The company managed to pull off the landing even with the spacecraft’s laser range finders — which determine essential variables like altitude and horizontal velocity — being broken. Instead, the lander leveraged one of the onboard payloads, NASA’s laser and doppler lidar sensors, to guide the spacecraft to the lunar surface.
This is the first time America has put hardware on the moon in nearly 50 years. The spacecraft’s landing site — just outside the rim of a crater called Malapert-A — is also the closest any lander has gotten to the lunar south pole. The south pole has emerged as a region of major interest to both commercial companies and NASA; the space agency has been eyeing the area as a possible location to establish a sustained human presence on the moon as part of its Artemis program.
It’s certainly an extraordinarily positive beginning for Houston-based Intuitive Machines, one of just a few companies in the world that’s focused on providing services on and around the moon. Along with lunar landers, the company is also developing technologies related to mobility, power and data services for the moon. The company’s betting that lunar market activity — which exists at a very small scale today, and is primarily driven by NASA funding — will only grow in the coming years.
This mission is itself the result of a NASA contract awarded under the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The CLPS program is designed to kickstart commercial development of landers to deliver scientific and research payloads to the moon’s surface. All in all, Intuitive Machines’ contract is worth a little less than $118 million.
“As of our third planned mission, we’re seeing more and more non-CLPS payloads from both domestic and international companies and institutions,” Josh Marshall, communications director of Intuitive Machines, said.
Intuitive Machines’ victory comes shortly after another CLPS awardee, Astrobotic, failed to put its lander on the moon. That mission was cut short very shortly after launch due to a catastrophic propulsion leak.
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. My stomach is still in knots from the Intuitive Machines landing livestream. I think it’s fair to say that the words of Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines’ CTO, will go down in history: “We’re not dead yet.”
Very metal.
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Story of the week
For the first time since 1972, American hardware is on the moon. Intuitive Machines’ first lander, called Odysseus, softly touched down on the south pole region of the moon around 5:23 p.m. Central Time on Thursday, bringing to a close an eight-day journey and years of hard work.
There was a brief period after landing when mission controllers waited to reestablish communications with the spacecraft. Then a faint signal was detected.
“What we can confirm without a doubt is that our equipment is on the surface of the moon and we are transmitting,” Crain said shortly after the signal was detected. “So congratulations IM team, we’ll see how much more we can get from that.”
“Houston, Odysseus has found its new home,” he added.
The company later confirmed on the social media site X that Odysseus was “alive and well.”
Intuitive Machines is not the only entity celebrating. The mission is also a huge success for NASA, which paid Intuitive Machines around $118 million to deliver six scientific and research payloads, under a program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services.
Image Credits: Intuitive Machines (opens in a new window)
Exclusive of the week
Hadrian, a company that is automating high-precision CNC machining, closed a $117 million Series B, in a mix of equity and debt, with new participation from RTX Ventures, the venture arm of defense prime RTX (formerly called Raytheon).
The new funding will help the company double its software and automation teams, break ground on a second factory in the third quarter and much, much more.
“We’ve got a lot to do in the next two years, but very grateful that in a very tough fundraising environment that new investors and existing investors and industry players like Raytheon are stepping up to the plate and giving us the capital that we need to keep up with the customer demand,” Hadrian CEO Chris Power said.
Hadrian headquarters. Image Credits: Hadrian
What we’re reading
Last week, I really enjoyed reading “Why It Took the US 51 Years to Get Back on the Moon” by Bloomberg’s Loren Grush.
I hear this a lot from people that don’t closely follow the space industry. It’s always some variation of, “We did it in the 70s, why can’t we seem to do it now, with such improvements in software, compute, robotics, materials, et cetera et cetera?”
The next time you encounter such a question, send them Grush’s story.
“We say we’ve been there before, but these companies haven’t been there before,” said planetary physicist Philip Metzger. “It is really new technology that’s being perfected and matured right now.”
Alan Shepard on the moon NASA. Image Credits: NASA
This week in space history
On February 25, 1969, NASA launched Mariner 6, a massive spacecraft designed to image the surface of Mars.
Five months after launch, the 840-pound spacecraft made it to the red planet. The spacecraft (along with its twin, Mariner 7, which launched a month later) captured data on Mars’ atmosphere and surface, and relayed dozens of photographs back to Earth.
The Mariner 6 spacecraft lifts off on an Atlas-Centaur rocket on February 24, 1969. Image Credits: NASA
Family location services company Life360 has launched a new notification for its apps to automatically alert friends and family when you reach a destination after taking a flight.
Life360 said that the feature uses phone sensors to measure location, altitude and speed to determine if you are taking a flight. Plus, its algorithms can detect takeoff and landing times, and alert family members when you connect to the network post-landing.
The company said the landing notification feature is a useful alternative to online flight trackers or waiting for the traveler to send updates to their circle. The feature is enabled for all users with the latest app update and can be turned off through the Flight Detection toggle in the settings.
Life360, which has more than 66 million active users on its platform, said that the people in a flight-taking user’s circle can see a plane icon as a movement indicator — adding to the current set of activities such as walking, running, biking and driving.
The company’s CEO Chris Hulls told TechCrunch that the company wants to focus on safety and protection updates for users’ inner circle. He said that comparatively, Apple’s solution is very generic. Additionally, he noted that Life360 has the advantage of being on both iOS and Android.
Hulls said that the company is looking to launch a new Tile lineup, which it acquired in 2021 for $205 million, this year without providing more detail.
“We are going to make a unified hardware lineup that is far more robust than Apple, which is one size fits all. We will have Bluetooth tags and GPS devices with LTE connections, and it will be a more holistic service,” he said.
Life360 launched its premium membership in Canada in 2022 and in the U.K. in 2023. This year, the company aims to expand the paid tier to Australia.
