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Intuitive Machines shares soar after successful moon landing
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© Reuters. Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus spacecraft passes over the near side of the Moon following lunar orbit insertion on February 21, 2024, in this handout image released February 22, 2024. Intuitive Machines/Handout via REUTERS THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED
By Akash Sriram, Harshita Mary Varghese and Joey Roulette
(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 (2200 GMT).
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 moon with astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt.
“Congrats on landing on the moon!” Musk said in a post on X, soon after Intuitive said Odysseus was upright and starting to send data.
The company, co-founded in 2013 by serial space industry investor Kam Ghaffarian and NASA veterans Stephen Altemus and Tim Crain, is awaiting first images from the lunar surface.
The landing could open the doors to investments and government contracts, helping space companies ride out what has been a tough period of funding due to an uncertain economy.
“The technical acumen demonstrated today puts Intuitive Machines into a very exclusive club of space technology companies and government services contractors that can be relied upon to carry out the most demanding missions for NASA, DoD and other agencies,” Canaccord Genuity analyst Austin Moeller said.
The brokerage more than doubled its price target to $14, betting on the chances of the company winning high-revenue growth contracts, including from the government.
Intuitive Machines spent roughly $100 million developing its Odysseus lander, CEO Altemus told Reuters last year.
“We had to build an entire lunar program, not just a lander,” he said.
The company’s lander development also had $118 million in NASA funds under the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, an effort to spur private development of moon landers that can ship cargo at lower costs than the U.S. space agency’s traditional method of building and launching those lunar vehicles itself.
Privately held Astrobotic made the first moonshot attempt under the CLPS program last month but a propulsion leak doomed the mission. Texas-based Firefly Space, backed by private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, is expected to send its Blue Ghost lander to the moon later this year.
Shares of Intuitive Machines, which fell for two straight sessions before the landing, were among the top trending stocks on retail trader platform Stocktwits on Friday.
More shares traded in February – exceeding 200 million – than in the previous two years combined, according to LSEG data.
Still, with just 17.9 million shares, or less than 20% of the company’s outstanding shares, as free float, the stock is susceptible to outsized moves.
Ghaffarian, who is also the co-founder of Axiom Space, is on the board of other space organizations and has held numerous technical and management positions at Lockheed Martin (NYSE:), Ford (NYSE:) Aerospace and Loral.
CEO Altemus joined NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and the shuttle program in 1989, where he held several positions working in launch and landing activities.
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