The first commercial Moon landing

A privately built lander touched down near the lunar south pole, caught a foot, and tipped over onto its side — the first American landing on the Moon since 1972.

Its own laser rangefinders never fired: a safety switch had been left off before launch, and a pre-flight test that would have caught it was skipped. The team patched the flight software in transit to use an experimental NASA lidar that happened to be aboard as a payload, and the lander came in faster and more sideways than planned. It still worked for about a week.