For the past few days, mission control in Houston has been talking to the moon. It’s a throwback to an earlier space age, with a few tweaks. Mission control is not NASA, but a private American company called Intuitive Machines, sending instructions to an uncrewed lander about the size of a telephone booth. The spacecraft made a nail-biting descent to the lunar surface on Thursday, with a last-minute software patch to make up for malfunctioning navigation sensors. One of the spacecraft’s legs snagged the surface and the whole thing tipped over, landing on its side. But still: It was the first time an American spacecraft had landed on the moon in more than 50 years. The mission is the latest event in what has quickly become the busiest decade in lunar exploration since the 1960s. Government agencies and private companies in the United States, China, India, Japan, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates have all dispatched lunar landers in the past five years, with varying degrees of success. Many more missions, both uncrewed and crewed, …