Shares of Intuitive Machines Inc. continued their slide Monday as the space-exploration company said that its Odysseus moon-lander mission will be cut short.
Odysseus made history late Thursday when it became the first commercial lander to successfully reach the lunar surface. But the stock fell in extended trading Friday after it emerged that the lander had fallen on its side while touching down near the moon’s south pole.
Intuitive Machines’
LUNR,
-2.99%
shares are down 36.4% Monday. The decline puts the stock on pace for its largest percentage decrease since Feb. 23, 2023, when it fell 75.24%, Dow Jones Market Data show.
“Odysseus continues to communicate with flight controllers in Nova Control from the lunar surface,” the company said in a statement. “After understanding the end-to-end communication requirements, Odysseus sent images from the lunar surface of its vertical descent to its Malapert A landing site, representing the furthest south any vehicle has been able to land on the Moon and establish communication with ground controllers.”
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“Flight controllers intend to collect data until the lander’s solar panels are no longer exposed to light,” Intuitive Machines added. “Based on Earth and Moon positioning, we believe flight controllers will continue to communicate with Odysseus until Tuesday morning.”
The Associated Press reported that the abbreviated mission will be two or three days short of the roughly one-week timespan that NASA and other Intuitive Machines customers had been counting on for the lander’s communications.
The IM-1 mission is carrying NASA instruments focusing on plume-surface interactions, space-weather and lunar-surface interactions, radio astronomy, precision-landing technologies, and a communication and navigation node for future autonomous-navigation technologies, according to the space agency.
Commercial moon landings are considered important scouting missions for NASA’s Artemis moon-exploration program. Last month, NASA said it is targeting September 2025 for its first crewed Artemis mission around the moon, and September 2026 for its Artemis mission to land astronauts near the lunar south pole.
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In 2019, Israel’s Beresheet attempted to become the first private lander on the lunar surface, but crashed during its landing attempt. Four years later, Japan’s private Hakuto-R mission also failed to achieve a “soft landing” on the moon.
In January, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s uncrewed Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, landed on the moon, but the probe appeared to be upside down on the lunar surface in an image taken by SLIM’s rover. On Monday, JAXA confirmed that the SLIM probe had survived a two-week-long lunar night and had maintained its communication capabilities. SLIM’s recovery from the cold lunar night was described as “remarkable” by Space.com.
Last month, private U.S. space company Astrobotic Technology ended its troubled mission to place its Peregrine lander on the moon.
Like Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, Intuitive’s Nova-C lander is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative to deliver science and technology to the moon’s surface.
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The Nova-C landers are scheduled for three missions to the moon, each of which has slight vehicle modifications, according to Intuitive Machines.
Rey Mashayekhi contributed.
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