WASHINGTON — After two hard landings on the moon, Intuitive Machines is outlining a more diversified future for the company, with a greater emphasis on data services and other activities beyond lunar landings.
In a March 24 earnings call, company executives said their focus in the coming years is to develop services, like lunar communications, that could prove to be more profitable than landers.
“We’re really moving into this data services business, a full-court press here,” Steve Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said on the call when asked to outline the company’s vision for the next three to five years. “We see this lunar data network that we’re installing with the data relay satellites and the ground stations as really, I would deem, a national asset, and that asset can be used by many different customers.”
The company won a NASA contract in September 2024 worth to provide communications and navigation services at the moon. It was also one of four companies selected in December for additional direct-to-Earth communications services. The awards are part of a program with a maximum value of $4.8 billion over 10 years.
Altemus said Intuitive Machines is making progress on a network of five satellites in lunar orbit that will support those communications services. The first one will launch as a secondary payload on the company’s IM-3 lunar lander mission in 2026, followed by two more launching as secondaries on IM-4 in the second half of 2027. The final two would launch a year later, although executives did not disclose deployment plans for those spacecraft.
While the company is best known for its lunar lander missions, the company emphasized other lines of business in the earnings call. In addition to the data services work, Altemus said the company is working on an orbital transfer vehicle called Nebula based on its Nova-C lunar lander.
“We can deliver satellites, multiple satellites, to varying locations around cislunar space,” Altemus said. He said the company is working on that as a subcontractor to an unidentified government customer.
The company is continuing design work on a lunar rover for Artemis missions, the Lunar Terrain Vehicle, under a contract awarded nearly a year ago, as well as a larger lander, called Nova-D, that would deliver it to the surface. But the company said even if NASA makes an award for full development of the rover later this year, procured through a services contract, the company does not expect significant revenue from that work until 2026.
The company reported $228 million in revenue in 2024, up from $79.5 million in 2023, and is forecasting $250 million to $300 million in revenue in 2025. The company had an adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) loss of $41.7 million in 2024, compared to a $54.5 million loss in 2023. The company said it is on track for positive adjusted EBITDA in 2026.
IM-2 and beyond
Intuitive Machines offered few new details in the call about its latest lunar lander mission, IM-2, which fell on its side after landing in the south polar region of the moon March 6 and operated for barely 12 hours on the surface before the company and NASA declared the mission over.
Altemus said the company is going through a review it calls a “hot wash” to examine all aspects of the mission, an effort that includes external reviewers from NASA and ESA. “We identify not only what went wrong but what went right,” he said. That process will be complete in mid-April, he said, after which the company will brief NASA and other external stakeholders.
One area of focus will be the lander’s laser altimeters, which the company said immediately after landing were providing “noisy” data, which could account for landing at a higher speed than planned.
Altemus argued that despite the hard landing and limited lifetime, the lander was still able to provide data for NASA and other customers, such as Nokia Bell Labs, which planned to test a 4G/LTE communications network. “Nokia Bell Labs had a fully successful payload operations on the moon where they tested out each element of their cellular network with us,” he said. “This is really a good news story in how you can take that technology all the way to TRL level 9,” or full maturity, he argued.
In a statement to SpaceNews March 7, Nokia said it was able to power up and test its “Network in a Box” payload on the lander, including communications with the ground. “Unfortunately, Nokia was unable to make the first cellular call on the Moon due to factors beyond our control that resulted in extreme cold temperatures on our user device modules,” the company added, noting the unit operated for only 25 minutes.
Altemus is scheduled to testify at an April 1 hearing by the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee on NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program that will also include NASA officials and executives from Astrobotic and Firefly Aerospace, two other companies that have flown lunar lander missions as part of CLPS. Only Firefly has had a fully successful mission with its recent Blue Ghost 1 lander.
He said in the earnings call that he would emphasize the “success of lunar commercialization” at the hearing as well as plans for second version of CLPS, dubbed CLPS 2.0, that could include larger landers and other commercial services to support not just science but also human spaceflight and technology development. “All of that is what we want to communicate to the House about CLPS 2.0,” he said.
