In risky moon business, Intuitive Machines sets sights on second moonshot

investing.com:

By Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Intuitive Machines and its space-cargo customers expect the company to emerge stronger from its problem-plagued moon landing this week, with improvements set for the company's second lander after its first went where no private firm has gone before.

The company's Odysseus moon lander neared the end of a week-long mission near the lunar south pole on Thursday after a mix of successes and failures that illustrated the type of risks the company and NASA, the mission's biggest backer, have come to embrace.

NASA is betting that backing a series of low-budget, private missions to the moon will be pathfinders for missions carrying astronauts this decade. The plan gives financial room for failure and offers companies big incentives to succeed on a shoestring.

«It's a new way of going to the moon, eventually to Mars, and it's a new moon that we go to,» NASA chief Bill Nelson said in an interview, calling Intuitive Machines' mission a successful example. «We don't go to a permanently lit, smoother area on the equator like Apollo, we go to a very hazardous, dark area with a bunch of pits.»

Intuitive Machines' stock dipped 4.4% on Thursday.

As Odysseus sent its final pings of data to Earth, the shares — which nearly tripled, then plummeted, in wild swings over the course of the mission — remained up about 13% from just before the launch, giving the company a market value of about $560 million.

The lander fell on its side after a series of problems, including the need for a last-minute workaround for a laser that told the machine where the surface was. NASA and the lander's commercial participants could communicate with their instruments but failed to get all the data they wanted.

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