Jerome Powell may still be working on his soft landing, but over on the moon, it’s already been done.

Last night, Intuitive Machines’s Odysseus lander became the first US spacecraft to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, marking a huge step forward for lunar discovery, private space missions, and anyone gunning for Zenon: Z3 to become a reality.

After teams on the ground fixed a last-minute navigation issue, the Houston-based company’s lander made it to the southern pole region of the moon around 6:30pm ET on Thursday, a week after it launched into space aboard a SpaceX rocket. Odysseus can now begin its journey to discover if there’s water in the moon’s craters.

Privatizing space

NASA remains laser-focused on getting humans back on the moon with its Artemis program. But with a budget one-tenth the size it was at the height of the Apollo program, the space agency is turning to the private sector to make Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” come true.

IM’s Odysseus mission is part of the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), an initiative that partners the agency with private companies, allowing NASA to send data-collecting instruments to the moon aboard private spacecraft while spending significantly less money than if it had to send its own.

• NASA paid $118 million to Intuitive Machines for Odysseus to take six high-tech research machines to the moon.
• According to Thomas Zurbuchen, who led the creation of the CLPS program, this type of mission could cost half a billion to a billion dollars if led by NASA.

In December, India landed a spacecraft on the moon’s south pole for $75 million—less than the reported budget of Madame Web.

But the trend of cheaper missions also means a higher likelihood of failure. Last month, the Peregrine lander from Astrobotic Technology—another company working with NASA via the CLPS initiative—failed to reach the moon after a fuel leak.

IM stock is up, up, and away. The company’s stock struggled after going public a year ago, but excitement around Odysseus made that a thing of the past: It has soared 300% since last month, proving that moon landings aren’t just for space nerds but finance bros, too.—CC

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Google put Gemini in timeout amid diversity backlash. The tech giant announced it’s pausing the AI tool’s ability to generate images of people after users discovered it created historically inaccurate images, including Vikings, popes, and World War II-era German soldiers of various races and genders. Outrage soon followed, with critics accusing the company of overcorrecting for potential racial biases in AI. Google apologized, saying Gemini missed the mark, and promised to release an improved version soon. The hiccup comes as Google makes a series of updates to Gemini (like its name—it was formerly Bard) in a bid to catch up to Microsoft and OpenAI in the AI arms race.

Japan’s Nikkei stock index hit an all-time high. Stocks surged 2.1% yesterday, surpassing the record set in 1989 at the height of the country’s postwar economic boom. Nvidia’s epic Q4 earnings helped lift stocks around the world, but Japan’s surge was already bubbling, thanks to foreign investors, strong corporate profits, and the downturn in China. Still, Japan’s economy remains in a recession as—unlike in the US and much of the world—officials are keeping interest rates low to spur inflation and stop the yen from weakening.

The pandas are coming. Our long national nightmare is over: China will send two giant pandas to the San Diego Zoo by the end of the summer, the Associated Press reported, in a sign of thawing tensions between the two global powers. American panda enthusiasts were distraught after zoos in Washington, DC, and Memphis, Tennessee, sent their pandas back to China last year, leaving the four at the Atlanta zoo as the only black-and-white furballs left in the US. But during their face-to-face November meeting in California, President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged to ease relations, renewing the longstanding tradition of “panda diplomacy.” The China Wildlife Conservation Association is reportedly also in talks to send pandas to DC, Madrid, and Vienna.

Thanks to an anonymous whistleblower, the world now has more insight than ever into the Chinese government’s cyber-espionage efforts, which US officials rank as one of America’s top security threats.

Hundreds of pages posted to GitHub last week and deemed credible detail how officials in China hire private-sector hackers to surveil and disrupt societies domestically and abroad, fueling a lively cyberspying marketplace.

The documents showed the cards of one Chinese hacking firm, ISoon. According to the files, over at least eight years:

• ISoon hackers contracted with Chinese government bureaus to target political dissidents in China and government officials in 20+ foreign nations, including the UK, by infiltrating social media or email accounts, wi-fi networks, and other infrastructure.
• The firm mostly helped China get info from other Asian countries, including road network data from Taiwan, which could help the Chinese military in an invasion.
• ISoon’s product list claimed to be able to gain remote access to Microsoft Outlook and Hotmail accounts and to Apple iOS smartphone GPS, contacts, and recording. But internal chats show that ISoon frequently failed to steal info from governments.

The US has been sounding the alarm. China’s support for and payment of contracted hackers has created such a large cyberespionage network that China’s hackers outnumber the FBI’s cyber/intelligence people 50 to 1, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Congress last month.—ML

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If you didn’t read yesterday’s newsletter because you were one of the tens of thousands of AT&T customers without internet access, we’ll give you a pass (just this once).

Starting around 4am ET on Thursday, customers began reporting widespread internet and cell service outages, according to Downdetector.com. Then, around 8am ET, the outages peaked at 74,000+ reports, with most issues thronged in cities like Houston, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. AT&T said that by late morning, 75% of its network was back up and running, and that the issue was resolved by late Thursday afternoon.

Emergency services: First responders said some customers couldn’t get through to 911 operators and urged them to use the ancient device known as a landline instead. The Massachusetts State Police asked people to please stop calling 911 just to check if their service was working, as call centers in the state were inundated with test dials.

What happened? AT&T blamed the outage on a software update gone poorly. Before that, there were, naturally, murmurs online of a possible cyberattack, but experts say these kinds of outages almost always stem from boring, non-Mission Impossible-sounding reasons like construction equipment hitting cables or human errors.—MM

Stat: If you feel like your job doesn’t require your college degree, we’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is you’re probably right. The good news is you’re in the majority, so don’t feel too regretful. More than half of college grads are in jobs that don’t use their degrees, according to a research study of 10 million Americans, reported on by the Wall Street Journal. The stats are worse for some areas of study than others: 68% of public safety and security grads, for instance, are underemployed, while just 23% of grads with health-related degrees are. The research found that internships play a huge role in determining a student’s odds of landing a college-level job after graduation.

Quote: “This is going to become a wild race to the bottom where no one in labor wins. It’s going to demolish our industry.”

Karla Ortiz, a concept artist who’s worked on Marvel movies, sums up the general reaction of many Hollywood workers toward AI art- and video generators like OpenAI’s recently released Sora. The tool, which can create intricate videos from a simple text prompt, has the entire industry on edge, with many human artists wondering if the robots might one day make their work obsolete—a major sticking point in the writers and actors strikes last year.

Read: Can AI prevent suicide? (Time)

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