Intuitive Machines shares soar after successful moon landing
By Akash Sriram and Harshita Mary Varghese
(Reuters) -Shares of Intuitive Machines soared 33% on Friday as the company became the first private firm to land a spacecraft on the moon, heralding an era of more such missions for space exploration.
The lander is «alive and well» as flight controllers extract the first batches of scientific data, Intuitive Machines said in its latest update.
The landing, the first U.S. touchdown on the lunar surface in more than half a century, put the space exploration company on track to waltz past $1 billion in market value.
More than 56 million shares exchanged hands in two hours after the opening bell. Earlier this week, the stock had seen the highest trading volume of about 64 million shares.
«This is a major achievement that should help boost awareness and credibility for the entire industry and companies like Rocket Lab, among others, will benefit from this,» said Andres Sheppard, senior analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald, which was an investment banking partner for Intuitive Machines.
Company executives and NASA officials have scheduled a news conference to discuss the landing and its upcoming science objectives at 5 p.m. ET.
Shares of fellow space firms Astra Space, Satellogic and RedWire gained between 2.1% and 4.8%.
The Texas-based company's lunar lander, dubbed «Odysseus», touched down at the Malapert A crater, about 300 km from the moon's south pole on Thursday.
It was sent to the moon last Thursday using a Falcon 9 rocket launched by Elon Musk's SpaceX from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The landing represented the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a U.S. spacecraft since Apollo 17 in 1972, when NASA's last crewed mission docked on the
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