Only national space agencies have ever landed on the Moon
The old claim turned out to be wrong and was rejected by evidence.
TaughtSoft-landing on the Moon is so hard that only three superpowers (the United States, the Soviet Union, and China) have ever managed it. A soft landing is a feat of national space programs, not something a private company can do.
NowOn 22 February 2024, Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander touched down near the Moon's south pole: the first soft landing on the Moon by a privately built spacecraft, and the first American landing of any kind since Apollo 17 in 1972.
What actually happened
It was not a tidy landing: Odysseus came down faster than planned and tipped to about a 30-degree angle, snapping a landing leg. But it survived, powered up, and returned data from its payloads, enough that NASA and Intuitive Machines counted it a success, and enough to settle the categorical claim.
The honesty is in the asterisks. The mission flew under NASA's commercial lunar program, so 'private' does not mean 'without government customers,' and it happened weeks after another company's lander failed to reach the surface. What changed is precise: the sentence 'only governments have landed spacecraft on the Moon' stopped being true in February 2024.
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Who was taught this
Still standard through 2024, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2024 learned the earlier version.