Credit: Intuitive Machines

HOUSTON, TX—April 3, 2024 – NASA has awarded Intuitive Machines, Inc. (Nasdaq: LUNR, LUNRW) (“Intuitive Machines”) (“Company”) $30 million as a prime contractor to complete a Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services Feasibility Assessment. The contract tasks the Company’s global team with creating a feasibility roadmap to develop and deploy a Lunar Terrain Vehicle (“LTV”) on the Moon using Intuitive Machines’ Nova-D cargo-class lunar lander. The first phase award marks the Company’s entrance into human spaceflight operations within NASA’s $4.6 billion LTV Services project.

“This procurement strategically aligns with the Company’s flight-proven capability to deliver payloads to the surface of the Moon under the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, further solidifying our position as a proven commercial contractor in lunar exploration,” said Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus. “Our global team is on a path to provide essential lunar infrastructure services to NASA in a project that would allow the Company to retain ownership of the vehicle for commercial utilization during periods of non-NASA activity over approximately ten years of lunar surface activity.”

Intuitive Machines’ Moon Reusable Autonomous Crewed Exploration Rover (RACER) global team partners, including AVL, Boeing, Michelin, and Northrop Grumman, intend to provide a robust LTV design architecture with advanced power management, autonomous driving, communications, and navigation systems for lunar exploration.

Source: Intuitive Machines

Kris Christiaens's Avatar

Kris Christiaens

This article was published by FutureSpaceFlight founder and chief editor Kris Christiaens. Kris Christiaens has been passionate and fascinated by spaceflight and space exploration all his life and has written hundreds of articles on space projects, the commercial space industry and space missions over the past 20 years for magazines, books and websites. In late 2021, he founded the website FutureSpaceFlight with the goal of promoting new space companies and commercial space projects and compiling news of these start-ups and companies on one website.