Intuitive Machines' CLPS bet: first US Moon landing since Apollo, then Athena tips too

Intuitive Machines was founded in Houston in 2013 by three space veterans — Steve Altemus, Kam Ghaffarian and Tim Crain — to sell lunar surface access, orbit delivery and communications. Their wager was that NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which pays fixed prices for robotic Moon deliveries, would let a small private company become a repeat commercial carrier instead of a government contractor building one-off spacecraft.

The bet first paid off with IM-1: launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on 2024-02-15, the Nova-C lander Odysseus touched down near Malapert A crater, about 300 km from the Moon's south pole, at 6:23 p.m. ET on 2024-02-22 — the first US lunar landing since Apollo 17 and the first by a private spacecraft. But the landing was rough: the laser range finder had stopped working, the craft tipped onto its side after catching on the surface, and it operated only about a week before the lunar night ended the mission.

A year later, IM-2's lander Athena launched on 2025-02-26 and touched down on 2025-03-06 at Mons Mouton, about 160 km from the south pole — then landed roughly 250 meters off target inside a crater and tipped over again. NASA, which paid $62 million for three experiments on the flight, received about 250 megabytes of data before the lander's batteries drained within about 12 hours; its ice drill was activated but could not penetrate the surface from the fallen lander. The company's stock fell 29% in after-hours trading, and on 2025-03-07 the mission was declared over.

The pattern framed the bet's true cost: both landings lost the final fight with their laser altimeters, so each toppled mission burned the science payloads customers had paid to land upright. Yet NASA kept the relationship — Intuitive Machines holds CLPS task orders for IM-3 (2026) and IM-4 (2027) — and the company said it must find what went wrong before flying again.