$9.8M Contract Propels Intuitive Machines’ Orbital Transfer Vehicle Toward Flight Readiness

  • July 30, 2025
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  • $9.8M Contract Propels Intuitive Machines’ Orbital Transfer Vehicle Toward Flight Readiness

HOUSTON, July 30, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Intuitive Machines, Inc. (Nasdaq: LUNR, “Intuitive Machines,” or the “Company”), a leading space technology and infrastructure services company, has secured a $9.8 million Phase Two government contract to advance its Orbital Transfer Vehicle (“OTV”) through Critical Design Review (“CDR”)—the final engineering milestone on a previously disclosed contract, before manufacturing begins. The Phase Two of the contract expands the Company’s growing government portfolio and signals increasing demand for its in-space mobility solutions beyond lunar surface delivery.

Intuitive Machines believes this non-NASA award reinforces the Company’s strategic move to diversify its customer base and deliver orbital capabilities that span commercial, civil, and national security space operations.

Built on the flight-proven Nova-C lander architecture, the OTV draws heritage from hardware and designs that have been successfully validated in two lunar missions, including trajectory refinement maneuvers, lunar orbit insertion, and main engine firings during descent.

“Our OTV is a direct evolution of our lunar surface delivery missions—positioning us to expand into the rapidly growing market for in-space logistics,” said Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus. “We’re leveraging our flight-proven technology to operate a mission-ready service that delivers customer payloads across orbits—from Earth to the Moon and beyond.”

With an anticipated payload capacity of approximately 2,100 kilograms, the OTV is engineered for high-agility, time-efficient transfer of spacecraft and mission hardware across a wide range of destinations, including:

–   Medium Earth Orbit (MEO)
–   Geostationary Orbit (GEO)
–   Lagrange Points
–   Cislunar Injection Trajectories
–   Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO)
–   Low Lunar Orbit (LLO)
–   Interplanetary Destinations

Image depicting Intuitive Machines' Orbital Transfer Vehicle and its intended orbits around the Earth and Moon

The vehicle’s optimized structure and propulsion architecture support flexible mission profiles and can evolve to meet future orbital servicing, logistics, and communications needs.

Part of Intuitive Machines’ delivery service pillar, the OTV complements the Company’s growing portfolio of lunar landers, Earth reentry vehicles, and space-based data transmission infrastructure—delivering end-to-end mobility solutions for the Earth-Moon economy.

With Critical Design Review underway, Intuitive Machines is preparing to begin manufacturing and flight integration as early as 2026—positioning the Company to support a new class of on-orbit logistics missions in service of government, commercial, and exploration customers.

About Intuitive Machines

Intuitive Machines is a diversified space technology, infrastructure, and services company focused on fundamentally disrupting lunar access economics. In 2024, Intuitive Machines successfully landed the Company’s Nova-C class lunar lander, on the Moon, returning the United States to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. In 2025, Intuitive Machines returned to the lunar south pole with a second lander. The Company’s products and services are focused through three pillars of space commercialization: Delivery Services, Data Transmission Services, and Infrastructure as a Service. For more information, please visit intuitivemachines.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, as amended. These statements that do not relate to matters of historical fact should be considered forward-looking. These forward-looking statements generally are identified by the words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “might,” “plan,” “possible,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “should,” “strive,” “would,” “strategy,” “outlook,” the negative of these words or other similar expressions, but the absence of these words does not mean that a statement is not forward-looking. These forward-looking statements include but are not limited to statements regarding: our expectations and plans relating to our OTV. These forward-looking statements reflect the Company’s predictions, projections, or expectations based upon currently available information and data. Our actual results, performance or achievements may differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. The following important factors and uncertainties, among others, could cause actual outcomes or results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements in this presentation: our reliance upon the efforts of our Board and key personnel to be successful; our limited operating history; our failure to manage our growth effectively; competition from existing or new companies; unsatisfactory safety performance of our spaceflight systems or security incidents at our facilities; failure of the market for commercial spaceflight to achieve the growth potential we expect; any delayed launches, launch failures, failure of our satellites or lunar landers to reach their planned orbital locations, significant increases in the costs related to launches of satellites and lunar landers, and insufficient capacity available from satellite and lunar lander launch providers; our customer concentration; risks associated with commercial spaceflight, including any accident on launch or during the journey into space; risks associated with the handling, production and disposition of potentially explosive and ignitable energetic materials and other dangerous chemicals in our operations; our reliance on a limited number of suppliers for certain materials and supplied components; failure of our products to operate in the expected manner or defects in our products; counterparty risks on contracts entered into with our customers and failure of our prime contractors to maintain their relationships with their counterparties and fulfill their contractual obligations; failure to successfully defend protest from other bidders for government contracts; failure to comply with various laws and regulations relating to various aspects of our business and any changes in the funding levels of various governmental entities with which we do business; our failure to protect the confidentiality of our trade secrets and know how; our failure to comply with the terms of third-party open source software our systems utilize; our ability to maintain an effective system of internal control over financial reporting, and to address and remediate material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting; the U.S. government’s budget deficit and the national debt, as well as any inability of the U.S. government to complete its budget process for any government fiscal year, and our dependence on U.S. government contracts and funding by the government for the government contracts; our failure to comply with U.S. export and import control laws and regulations and U.S. economic sanctions and trade control laws and regulations; uncertain global macro-economic and political conditions (including as a result of a failure to raise the “debt ceiling”) and rising inflation; our history of losses and failure to achieve profitability and our need for substantial additional capital to fund our operations; the fact that our financial results may fluctuate significantly from quarter to quarter; our holding company status; the risk that our business and operations could be significantly affected if it becomes subject to any securities litigation or stockholder activism; our public securities’ potential liquidity and trading; and other public filings and press releases other factors detailed under the section titled Part I, Item 1A. Risk Factors of our Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”), the section titled Part I, Item 2, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations and the section titled Part II. Item 1A. “Risk Factors” in our most recently filed Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, and in our subsequent filings with the SEC, which are accessible on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov and the Investors section of our website at www.investors.intuitivemachines.com investors.intuitivemachines.com.

Contacts

For investor inquiries:

[email protected]

For media inquiries:

[email protected]

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/36d47f40-ebca-4b18-a503-64529005a3e6


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