Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Intuitive Machines builds and flies spacecraft that carry science and cargo to the Moon for NASA and other customers.
Intuitive Machines is a space company that builds lunar landers and sells the rides, the delivery, and the data that come with them. Its main customer is NASA, which pays it to carry instruments and cargo to the Moon under a program that buys moon deliveries in chunks rather than paying for a giant rocket program. The company also sells related services, like the communication and navigation gear that helps spacecraft find their way and stay in touch.
The core of the business is a lander about the size of a small car that gets launched into space, flies itself to the Moon, and sets down on the surface. In February 2024, its Odysseus lander became the first privately built spacecraft to land softly on the Moon, which was a genuine milestone and also a messy one — it tipped over on touchdown. The company earns money per mission, often as fixed-price contracts, so the risk is baked in: if the lander fails, the company eats much of the cost. It is not selling software with fat margins; it is selling hardware where a single bad landing can wipe out a mission's profit. Its most important partner and customer is NASA, and its biggest competitors are other private space firms chasing the same government moon-delivery dollars. The flip side of that dependence is real: NASA's plans and budget choices steer the business. Still, the company has been pushing beyond one-off landers into a broader space services role, including work tied to communications around the Moon and hardware for future missions. The story behind it: Intuitive Machines was co-founded in 2013 by Kam Ghaffarian, Steve Altemus, and Tim Crain, and went public in 2023 by merging with a blank-check company. Its stock has been volatile — a space stock that trades on mission news. The blunt truth is that this is a small, ambitious company betting that delivering things to the Moon becomes a routine business; it is early, it is capital-hungry, and it has already shown both that it can land and how hard landing well really is.
Saved answer · last researched 22 Oct 2026
see a list of the most recent 300 searches below: