A Houston space company is slated to land on the Moon's surface Thursday. Why it matters: Private, unmanned Moon landings are ramping up ahead of NASA's plan to put humans on the lunar surface this decade.

Athena is "slated to land in Mons Mouton, a lunar plateau near the Moon's South Pole, as part of NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign to establish a long-term lunar presence," per a NASA statement.

Once it arrived, the lander took plenty of pictures of our nearest celestial neighbor. From here, Blue Ghost will spend the next two weeks in lunar orbit, awaiting its chance to land and start performing its various experiments. The expected landing date is March 2.

More than fifty years passed between the last Apollo mission and the United States' return to the lunar surface, when the first-ever private lander touched down last February.

A four-legged robot from Texas landed squarely on the Moon on 2 March, becoming the first commercial spacecraft to execute a lunar landing without falling over or crashing. The lander, known as Blue Ghost and built by Firefly Aerospace, based in Cedar Park, Texas, aims to spend two weeks conducting science experiments provided by NASA.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Launch Complex-39A carrying the Nova-C lunar lander Athena as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload initiative from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida,

In a groundbreaking moment for space exploration, three private lunar landers are simultaneously en route to the Moon. The launch of Intuitive Machines' "Athena" aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 27,