The United States took a major step towards returning to the Moon on Thursday when the first private lunar lander took off from Florida.

SpaceX, the American company founded by Elon Musk, successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket carrying the lander, nicknamed Odysseus, from Cape Canaveral.

If all goes to plan, the spacecraft will land on the Moon next week, the first time the US has made a soft landing on the lunar surface since the final Apollo mission in 1972.

Odysseus, which is a Nova-C spacecraft designed by Texas-based Intuitive Machines, successfully separated from the Falcon 9 rocket that carried it into near-Earth orbit shortly after take-off. It is now on course for the Moon.

If successful, the mission will also mark the first time a private company has landed on the Moon, following a number of failed attempts over the past year.

Odysseus will operate for roughly two weeks on the Moon. It is carrying payloads for Nasa to help the agency prepare for humans returning to the Moon from 2025.

Landing on the Moon is tricky 

It will land in Malapert A crater, about 185 miles from the lunar South Pole, which is one of the candidate sites for the Artemis base camp where human missions would land.

“We’re getting even closer to the South Pole [of the Moon],” said Susan Lederer, Nasa project scientist for the mission. “That’s really good, for understanding the science and what the Moon is like at the South Pole because of course the Artemis base camp is planned to be at the South Pole.

“So it helps us to really start to understand the geology of where the astronauts are going to end up landing on the surface of the Moon.”

Landing on the Moon is notoriously tricky, with only the US, Russia, India, China and Japan having achieved the feat. All attempts by private companies have failed so far.

Last month, Astrobotic’s Peregrine Lunar lander was forced to abandon its mission after springing a fuel leak just a few hours after launch.

In April last year, the Hakuto-R lander, built by the Japanese company ispace, lost contact with mission controllers and crashed onto the lunar surface.