Intuitive Machines Seeks to Acquire NASA’s VIPER Lunar Rover

WASHINGTON — Intuitive Machines Inc. said it is organizing a consortium of organizations that will offer to take over a NASA lunar rover and launch it on one of the company’s landers.

In an earnings call on Aug. 13 about its second-quarter financial results, Intuitive Machines executives said they were planning to respond to a request for information (RFI) issued by NASA on Aug. 9 seeking input from companies and organizations interested in acquiring the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission that the agency said in July it would cancel.

Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said on the call that his company, which also responded to an earlier NASA call for “expressions of interest” for the Viper project, is working with other companies, universities and international partners to respond to NASA’s request for information. He did not identify any of those potential partners.

“Our position there is that VIPER science is important to lunar scientists and the future of the Artemis program, and it’s very important in terms of prospecting for volatiles and water ice locked in the soil,” he said.

NASA said in its request for information that potential partners would be responsible for the costs of any final testing and other work on the rover itself, as well as getting it to the moon’s surface and operating it once there. In its July 17 announcement that it was canceling VIPER, the agency said it would save at least $84 million by halting work on the rover, which is now complete and undergoing environmental testing.

Altemus said the company is still working to understand how much work remains on VIPER once NASA is done with it. “I don’t think the $84 million remaining budget is realistic in terms of what we might do commercially,” he said. “That’s a government number. That’s not a commercial number, so it’s not that significant, in my opinion.”

He said Intuitive Machines would use its larger Nova-D lander, still under development, to deliver the 500-kilogram spacecraft to the moon’s surface. The company would seek to monetize the mission by selling extra payload on Nova-D, which he said could carry up to 1,500 kilograms of payload.

“This gives us about 1,000 kilograms of additional payload space to improve the economics,” he said. “If we can leverage that 1,000 kilograms, it will offset any commercial flight costs for the mission.”

NASA is due to receive responses to the request for information on Sept. 2. Altemus said on the call that he expects to hear back from NASA later in September, though the agency did not provide a timeline for responses or what its next steps will be regarding the VIPER project. NASA is separately seeking international partnership opportunities for the VIPER project.

If Intuitive Machines gets the chance to fly VIPER commercially, he said, he expects the company to launch it in late 2027. NASA’s plans, as of its decision in July to cancel the mission, had been for a September 2025 launch.

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Intuitive Machines reported revenue of $41.4 million in the second quarter, more than double the $18 million the company reported in the same quarter in 2023. It also incurred an operating loss of $28.2 million in the quarter, also more than double the $13.2 million operating loss it reported in the same quarter last year.

The company attributed the revenue increase to new work, such as an engineering services contract with NASA that began late last year, as well as initial work on a lunar terrain vehicle services contract the company was awarded in April.

The growing losses came as a result of what Chief Financial Officer Steve Vontor called the “non-cash impacts” of adjustments to the next two lunar landing missions, IM-2 and IM-3, both of which carry payloads for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

“During the second quarter, we revised our revenue and contract cost estimates to reflect these adjustments, which resulted in lower progress toward completion,” he said. “However, the adjustments reduced uncertainty about the timeline for moving forward on our next two assignments.”

One of the modifications to the IM-2 mission has led to the final landing site for the mission. The company said in July that the new landing site is a 200-meter-wide oval area on the continuous Shackleton Ridge near the moon’s south pole. The area has favorable terrain, lighting, a line of sight to Earth for communications, and what the company said at the time was a “high probability of ice stability” within one meter of the surface, accessible by instruments on board the craft.

Altimus said on the call that the company now expects to launch IM-2 in December or early January, slightly later than previously expected. He said the delay was due to a contract amendment to reposition the landing site. Additionally, Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, which is required for the launch, may not be available until late November due to the planned October launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft and the time needed to reconfigure the platform afterward from Falcon Heavy to Falcon 9.

“That’s why we chose to move out of November and focus on December to January for launch attempts,” he added.

The next mission, IM-3, will be delayed due to “changes in payload delivery schedules by NASA,” he said. The company now expects to launch that mission in October or November 2025.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Aug. 13, the company said NASA’s CLPS mission order modification for the IM-2 mission is valued at $12.5 million, bringing estimated revenue from the mission from NASA and commercial customers to $122.4 million. The IM-3 mission modification, which is set to be completed in the third quarter, is valued at $10 million, with total revenue of $86.9 million as of the end of the second quarter.

The company added in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the IM-2 and IM-3 missions are in a “loss position.” The loss on IM-2 increased by $7.1 million in the quarter and on IM-3 by $10.9 million, which the company blamed on “unfavorable adjustments” resulting from task order modifications.

Altimus said on the call that he expects NASA to award the next CLPS mission order, CP-22, later this month. NASA’s CLPS program manager, Chris Colbert, said at the AIAA ASCEND conference on Aug. 1 that the agency is “very close” to awarding that mission order, which would be for a mission to the moon’s south polar region.

Intuitive Machines is also awaiting NASA’s award of contracts for the Near Space Network Services (NSNS) program, in which the agency will purchase communications services for missions operating within two million kilometers of Earth, including on and around the Moon.

“The NSNS contract award is imminent, and we believe Intuitive Machines is uniquely positioned to win and deliver lunar data satellites to support autonomous infrastructure on and around the Moon,” he said. There are two separate awards, one for direct communications to Earth and the other for relay services, which he said the company expects to issue in August or September.

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