The share price of Intuitive Machines kept rocketing on Thursday after its big debut on the Nasdaq earlier this week.
The commercial lunar lander company’s share price tripled in three days after it completed its merger with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp a special purpose acquisition company that traded on the Nasdaq.
Shares of Intuitive Machines had gained around 150% by late Thursday trading at around US$31.77.
It hasn’t been an easy ride for LUNR, however. Inflection Point had $301 million of cash in trust, and the companies said they had arranged an additional $55 million in investment from the SPAC’s sponsors and a founder of Intuitive Machines, along with $50 million CF Principal Investments LLC, an affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald & Company, according to reports.
But by the time the merger closed, the companies announced only $55 million of committed capital and no mention of any proceeds of the SPAC itself.
There was speculation that the cash could have been depleted by redemptions, where SPAC shareholders request their money back rather than hold stock in the merged company. Nearly one in three shareholders voted against the merger, an unusually high number for a SPAC transaction.
Commercialization of the moon beginning
Intuitive Machines’ debut mission, IM-1, will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 for the south pole of the moon in June or so, ahead of astronaut landings as soon as 2025 from the NASA-led Artemis program, according to Space.com.
NASA's Artemis program recently resulted in a successful Artemis 1 mission with the splashdown of the Orion capsule that spent almost a month in space traveling around the Moon.
Meanwhile, the first fully-privately-funded lunar mission was launched by SpaceX for Japanese company iSpace, which would be the first fully commercial mission to land on the Moon.
Intuitive Machines isn’t the only publicly-traded company fighting to get a foothold in the space race. There’s Cape Canaveral, Florida-based Sidus Space Inc (NASDAQ:SIDU), which was recently awarded a multi-million-dollar agreement with The Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) to deploy and test TNO’s laser communications technology aboard a Sidus LizzieSat satellite. Sidus shares gained around 30% on the back of the news this week.
Other stocks to watch include Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc (NYSE:SPCE), Terran Orbital (NYSE:LLAP), Satellogic (NASDAQ:SATL) Inc, and Momentus Inc (NASDAQ:MNTS).
Contact Angela at angela@proactiveinvestors.com
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