Intuitive Machines on Track for Second Moon Trip, Founder Says
(Bloomberg) — Intuitive Machines Inc. is moving forward with plans for another trip to the moon during the last three months of 2024, according to the space company’s billionaire founder.
The attempt would come less than a year after the company made history by setting down the first privately built lander intact on the moon and would be done in partnership with Finnish telecommunications giant Nokia Oyj.
“On our second mission, which will be in the last quarter of the year, we are actually installing a 4G network on the surface of the moon,” Kam Ghaffarian said in an interview Thursday at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco.
Ghaffarian’s comments indicate launch plans are on track after Intuitive Machines’ Chief Executive Officer Steve Altemus told investors in March that the company planned a second lunar landing later this year.
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Intuitive Machines went public in 2023 via a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, making Ghaffarian a billionaire several times over. The entrepreneur, who immigrated to the United States from Iran at the age of 18, has founded and partially bankrolled a string of companies focused on exploring niche and exotic businesses, ranging from space to nuclear reactors.
In addition to Intuitive Machines, he is co-founder of Axiom Space Inc., a company focused on developing commercial space stations. Ghaffarian said Axiom is on schedule to launch its first space station module in 2026 after raising $350 million in its most recent funding round. Axiom’s module will attach to the International Space Station — the first step toward creating a free flying space station over the next decade.
The company faces challenges from rivals including newcomer Vast and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin LLC, but Ghaffarian said he welcomes the competition.
“Space is limitless and infinite and so is the business associated with it,” he said. “We’re still at the beginning of the journey.”
Axiom also has been coordinating and overseeing trips to the International Space Station for paying customers flying on SpaceX’s rockets and crew capsules, a way to practice for an as yet unspecified time when Axiom hopes to allow tourists to visit its own space station.
NASA has also tapped Axiom and its partner luxury fashion brand Prada to make the space suits the agency’s astronauts will wear when they walk on the moon later this decade.
“The space economy is at the verge of really growing in a very accelerated manor,” Ghaffarian said, adding that “AI, quantum computing and robotics actually are force multipliers.”
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