Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander descended on Sunday from lunar orbit on autopilot, aiming for the slopes of an ancient volcanic dome in an impact basin on the moon's northeastern edge of the near side.
Confirmation of successful touchdown came from the company's Mission Control outside Austin, Texas, following the action some 360,000km away.
"You all stuck the landing. We're on the moon," Firefly's Will Coogan, chief engineer for the lander, reported.
An upright and stable landing makes Firefly — a startup founded a decade ago — the first private outfit to put a spacecraft on the moon without crashing or falling over. Even countries have faltered, with only five claiming success: Russia, the US, China, India and Japan.
Half an hour after landing, Blue Ghost started to send back pictures from the surface, the first one a selfie somewhat obscured by the sun's glare. The second shot included the home planet, a blue dot glimmering in the blackness of space.
Two other companies' landers are hot on Blue Ghost's heels, with the next one expected to join it on the moon later this week.
The second man to walk on the moon - Buzz Aldrin - watched as Blue Ghost touched down and sent his congratulations on X.
Blue Ghost — named after a rare US species of fireflies — had its size and shape going for it. The squat four-legged lander stands two metres tall and is 3.5 metres wide, providing extra stability, according to the company.
Launched in mid-January from Florida, the lander carried 10 experiments to the moon for NASA.
The space agency paid $US101 million ($A163 million) for the delivery, plus $US44 million ($A71 million) for the science and tech on board.
It's the third mission under NASA's commercial lunar delivery program, intended to ignite a lunar economy of competing private businesses while scouting around before astronauts show up later this decade.
Firefly's Ray Allensworth said the team continued to analyse the data to figure out the lander's exact position, but all indications suggest it landed within the 100-metre target zone in Mare Crisium.
The demos should get two weeks of run time, before lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.
It carried a vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure temperature as deep as three metres below the surface. Also on board: a device for eliminating abrasive lunar dust — a scourge for NASA's long-ago Apollo moonwalkers, who got it caked all over their spacesuits and equipment.
