NASA wants to establish a permanent human presence on the moon, but right now, astronauts have to be in direct line of sight with Earth to phone home.
The space agency is looking to change that with its developing Near Space Network, and it’s willing to pay potentially huge sums to private companies to help make continuous lunar communications a reality. Those plans got a boost today when NASA announced it had awarded Intuitive Machines a contract to build and deploy a satellite constellation capable of providing navigation and communications for future missions on or around the moon.
The Houston-based company is best known for pulling off the first-ever private moon landing in February. (That mission was cut short after the lander tripped on a rock and landed on its side, but it still counts.) The company sells a rideshare service to the moon, but payloads can only transmit data when in direct line of sight with a ground station.
The task order contract for the Lunar Relay has a maximum potential value of $4.82 billion, though that doesn’t mean Intuitive Machines will definitely be paid out that much over the five-year contracting period. The task order, which also includes an option to extend another five years, only guarantees $150 million, according to a regulatory filing. But it’s likely that the lunar satellite constellation, plus communications and navigation services, will top out at more than the base price.
Satellite relays stretching from geosynchronous orbit to near the moon’s orbit will also be essential to NASA’s nearer-term ambitions to land humans on the moon’s south pole before the end of the decade. According to the agency, that region of the moon provides few landing opportunities that are in direct communication with Earth’s ground stations. But even beyond crewed missions, a lunar relay could also enable new capabilities for uncrewed missions, like remote or autonomous operation of rovers, plus navigation services and boosted data transmission rates for payloads on the moon’s surface.
This infrastructure won’t just benefit NASA; private industry, including Intuitive Machines, will likely need more robust communications for future moon missions.
Intuitive Machines, which went public last year, counts business with the government among the bulk of its revenue. That includes multiple significant contracts for lunar lander services, via NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, engineering services, and a contract to design a next-gen lunar rover. In the second quarter of this year, the company’s revenue hit $41.4 million, a 130% increase year-over-year.