Intuitive Machines' second moon mission is still on track to launch before the end of this year, after the company had to make only minor modifications to the design of its lunar lander, executives said during an earnings call Thursday.
The company made history earlier this year when it became the first commercial company to land a spacecraft on the moon. That mission, called IM-1, was not without its quirks — the lander eventually became too hot and ended up on the surface — but it demonstrated the basic components of the lander, engine, and subsystems.
The same class of lander, which the company calls Nova-C, will return to the Moon later this year for that second mission. More importantly, the IM-2 mission will transport NASA payloads to search the lunar South Pole for water ice, a resource that could eventually be processed to propel rockets or support a permanent habitat for lunar astronauts.
The Intuitive Machines team has only identified “a handful of modifications” that will be implemented on the second lander, Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said during the earnings call.
“We don't really see any schedule impacts based on the changes from IM-1,” he said. “They're fairly straightforward.”
He added that among the changes that the company will implement are improvements to the laser rangefinder switching system. Laser rangefinders are a navigation subsystem on the lander, and help determine variables such as altitude and horizontal speed. Mission controllers learned very late in the game that the laser rangefinders on the first lander were ineffective, because engineers had not flipped a physical switch on the component while it was still on the ground. (They managed to land the spacecraft anyway through some very quick thinking.)
The second mission may be affected because NASA is still finalizing the landing site, which will be somewhere on the moon's south pole on a ridge near Shackleton Crater. When space agency The location of the landing site was originally announced For the IM-2 mission, they noted that data from the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft indicated that the region could contain subsurface ice.
Intuitive Machines finished the fourth quarter of 2023 with revenue of $30.6 million and a cash balance of just $4.5 million. That number got a big boost after an intuition investor exercised $50.6 million of warrants and the company closed a $10 million strategic equity investment.
As a result of these investments, as of March 1, the company's cash balance had swelled to nearly $55 million — the largest balance “for any quarter” since the company went public in February 2023.
After the second moon mission, 2024 is likely to be a pivotal year for the company, which awaits a decision on what could be very lucrative NASA awards. This includes the Lunar Terrain Vehicle award, which NASA will announce early next month, and the next lunar landing contract under the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.
