Houston-based lunar services firm Intuitive Machines ($LUNR) is planning its second lunar landing attempt in February, CEO Steve Altemus said in an earnings call yesterday.
The company beat quarterly revenue expectations with a top line of $58.5M and reported a growing contract backlog and sufficient cash on its balance sheet for at least another year.
Some of that revenue came from a contract the company won in September to develop a lunar communications and navigation satellite network for NASA .
Altemus also said the company had taken on a $9M mission to manage NASA sensors aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and South Korea’s Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, through a contract with Arizona State University.
You Know LRO: LRO has played a big role in scouting for lunar missions and spotting spacecraft (or their wreckage) post landing attempt, while the Shadowcam onboard KPLO is designed to peer into darkened craters. This contract, though, is something of a dry run for the company’s lunar network.
“When we do think about putting our own surveyor up around the Moon, we’ll now have the infrastructure in place on Earth,” Altemus said. “That gives us…the tools to search those petabytes of data that are collected around the Moon, and to provide some advanced analytics.”
Hot fire: Above all, the company’s fortunes ride on the February CLPS mission. A year earlier, the company’s first Nova-C lander arrived at the Moon safely, but a rougher than anticipated landing left it unable to complete all its objectives. The next lander has now completed propulsion testing, Altemus said.
Following the launch, Altemus is expecting a NA’SA design review in March of the company’s heavy cargo lander, Nova-D, which is competing to deliver large lunar rovers to the Moon.
Like this one: IM is in the running to build NASA a Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) and unveiled a prototype last week; the company said it will be undergoing tests at Meteor Crater National Park in Arizona later this month.
This story has been updated with additional details about Intuitive Machine’s work with lunar sensors.
