On Tuesday (February 20th), the stock price of Intuitive Machines Inc. in the United States rose by over 50% to $10.99 per share, surpassing its listing price of $10.03 after three consecutive days of sharp gains, reaching a peak of $12.05 per share during trading.
A year ago, the intuitive machine landed on NASDAQ through SPAC, but the stock price has been declining ever since. At the beginning of this year, Intuition Machine recorded a historic low of $2.089 per share, and no one expected it to quadruple from its low point in just one month. In the words of the cryptocurrency circle, this rise can be said to be a "landing on the moon".
On the news side, the intuitive machine is also getting closer to a successful lunar landing: its developed lunar lander Odysseus has successfully completed several key milestones in the IM-1 mission. One of the key stages is that Odysseus successfully starts the engine and will use it to adjust its trajectory to stay on target.
Last Thursday (January 15th), Elon Musk's SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was launched with Odysseus from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. According to the update on the official website of the intuitive machine, Odysseus continues to maintain good health and is preparing to enter lunar orbit on Wednesday, which is also the "biggest challenge" of the mission to date.
Intuitive machines predict that Odysseus will land on the moon at 16:49 Central Time on Thursday, February 22nd. If these steps are successfully completed, it will become the first American spacecraft to make a soft landing on the lunar surface since the Apollo 17 landing in 1972, and the first private lander to achieve this feat.
It is understood that Odysseus is a hexagonal cylinder, 4 meters high and 1.57 meters wide, with 6 landing legs and carrying 12 payloads, including 6 scientific instruments from NASA. For this, NASA paid $118 million to Intuition Machine Company in the contract. The other six payloads come from commercial customers.
The goal of the IM-1 mission is to use low-cost private spacecraft to transport scientific instruments and goods to the moon more frequently, in preparation for NASA's manned moon landing program. In 2019, NASA announced the new moon landing program of Artemis, and currently, this plan may be implemented as early as 2025.
Since the early 1960s, governments and private enterprises around the world have made more than 50 attempts to land on the moon, but the results have been mixed, and even now, the success rate of moon landing is still unstable. Last month, the American company Astrobotic's Peregrine Falcon lander malfunctioned shortly after launch, ultimately leading to the failure of the plan.