Intuitive Machines reported that it has secured a firm-fixed-price contract from NASA valued at up to $148.3 million to deliver a production-line-qualified Nova-C lander to the Moon by 2028. The announcement was followed by a 6% rise in the company’s shares in after-hours trading on Tuesday.
The award is the sixth Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract Intuitive Machines has received from NASA. Financially, the contract is structured with a $68.6 million base contract for mission execution and an additional $79.7 million performance incentive that becomes payable upon the successful demonstration of product-line qualification.
Under the terms of the award, Intuitive Machines will place a set of scientific and operational payloads on the lunar surface. Those payloads include advanced stereo cameras intended to analyze interactions between the lander plume and the lunar surface, a laser retroreflector array designed to support precise cislunar positioning, and a Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer radiation monitor to collect environmental safety data.
The company said it is scaling its manufacturing processes to enable high-volume production of Nova-C landers. Management framed the effort as a transition away from bespoke aerospace engineering toward commercial mass production of lunar infrastructure. Company leadership noted that the flight-proven Nova-C platform permits the firm to build, test, and deploy multiple landers in parallel.
Executives characterized the contract as supportive of NASA’s accelerated timetable for delivering payloads to the lunar surface and as facilitating the proliferation of Moon Base operational sites that back the Artemis program. The award’s structure - a defined mission base fee plus a substantial performance incentive tied to product-line qualification - links compensation to demonstrable production standards and mission readiness.
From a funding and operational perspective, the contract combines guaranteed mission execution funding with an incentive that is contingent on meeting qualification milestones. The arrangement aligns the company’s manufacturing scale-up with payment milestones tied to demonstrated product-line performance.
This development reinforces Intuitive Machines’ positioning within the commercial lunar services market and underlines the company’s stated shift toward producing multiple flight-capable landers in parallel to meet NASA’s objectives for lunar surface activity.