Mar 22, 2025 - IM-2 Overview + Recent Updates
Originally published 3/22/2025. Last revised 3/22/2025.
Last updated
Originally published 3/22/2025. Last revised 3/22/2025.
Last updated
Approximately 1 month ago, on February 26, at approx. 7:16 PM EST at Launch Complex 39A of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida the IM-2 mission launched successfully. Utilizing SpaceX's Falcon 9 Block 5 to fly outside the atmosphere, where Athena then detached to continue onwards while the Falcon 9 landed back at the launch pad, everything went as smoothly as it could be; Telemetry, communications, and systems were all in good health throughout the duration of Athena's mission to the moon. I've covered this launch in detail, as seen in my Feb 27 update , but unfortunately, I'm here today to cover the landing, which did not go nearly as well as planned.
On March 3, 2025, Athena completed her 492 second main engine Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) burn, which put her within the moon's orbit. Over the next couple of days following this, flight controllers analyzed data from Athena that was beamed back to Earth to help verify the lander's targeted orbit and confirm landing time, among other tasks such as sending selfies back to Earth, which several can be seen below (for the full album, check references).
After roughly 39 lunar orbits, with each orbit taking approximately 2 hours, Athena finally found her landing site of Mons Mouton in the Southern Region of the Moon that was fully exposed to adequate sunlight in order to power operations. Utilizing a Descent Orbit Insertion (DOI) at approximately 0433 CST on March 6, 2025, just one week after launch, Athena landed on the moon... although tipped over once again.
Flight controllers and engineers within the mission center of Intuitive Machines worked tirelessly to try and figure out what had happened, as communications were briefly lost upon touchdown on the moon (which was to be expected as explained within the livestream due to the landing location) and the joint NASA and IM livestream was ended abruptly with an announcement of a later-in-the-day press conference surrounding IM-2.
This press conference helped provide some clarity on the IM-2 mission and the Athena Lander as press were able to physically ask questions or call in questions, if attending virtually. Some interesting things that were brought up were:
The landing site picked, the Mons Mouton region, is known to have many craters and uneven terrain. Landing was always predicted to be difficult, but not impossible. Previous missions have always avoided this region due to these factors.
The design of the Athena Lander, with it spanning pretty tall and narrow, might seem like a flawed design due what might appear as a high center of gravity, however the Athena Lander actually has a pretty low center of gravity.
The IM-3 mission, now scheduled for a 2026 launch, has a rideshare of IM satellites, the first within the IM provided NSN contract awarded not too long ago.
Athena is equipped with many more cameras than Odysseus, the IM-1 lander.
There will be a 1 month period of time in which the IM team analyzes the IM-2 mission, to include what went wrong and how to fix these problems.
Even with this press conference, there were still many unknowns at the time; Athena's attitude, power levels, and exact locations were all unknown and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) was put to use by the IM team to help determine some of these factors to see exactly what happened, although estimates for this were that it would take approximately 48 hours. Within 48 hours, we had our answer that the Athena lander was officially tipped over, 400 meters from the intended landing site, and mostly inoperable with the mission concluded.
Luckily, some payloads and programs were greatly accelerated with what remaining power was available and were able to partially function briefly and send back 250 megabytes of mission critical data to Earth, such as NASA's PRIME-1 suite.
“Empowering American companies to deliver science and tech to the Moon on behalf of NASA both produces scientific results and continues development of a lunar economy,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for Exploration in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. “While we’re disappointed in the outcome of the IM-2 mission, we remain committed to supporting our commercial vendors as they navigate the very difficult task of landing and operating on the Moon.”
Again luckily, NASA pointed out the value that they have in their relationship with IM (within the press conference several times) and awarded all remaining funds from the IM-2 mission, which is typically awarded in milestone payments, to IM and declared this mission a partial success. Potential mishaps or even mission critical failures are written into contracts awarded from NASA to companies from the get go simply because exploring space and expanding the bounds of our technology, often remotely or autonomously, is very difficult and often comes with failure. NASA specifically pointed out that the purpose of these CLPS contracts is to massively reduce costs, which this $62.5M certainly would've been much more had it been ran under NASA's own program, to include R&D and building of a similar Athena lander. NASA still has IM-3 on the books for 2026 and IM-4 on the books for 2027, on top of other awarded non-lunar-landing related contracts that have already been awarded to LUNR.
I, for one, and deeply sad to see how the IM-2 mission turned out; From a flawless launch and flight to basically the worst case scenario upon landing, this did not go nearly as I, nor most others, expected. From being up almost 50% on my initial investment in its highs to losing 50% of value within 1 day, the share price plummeted off a cliff. I am still planning on holding, as this was always a lifetime hold in my book as the "space race" ramps up once again as our nation has its eyes set on the Moon and Mars once again, and I believe that LUNR will be crucial in helping us, as a species, return to the Moon and make first foot fall on Mars. To this day, I still hold my 200 shares and will be adding more over time, averaging down at these current levels, with my eyes set on 500 total shares below the $10 mark as my main first goal. I can only hope at this point that IM-3 will be a complete and overwhelming success to help return this company to what it was a couple months ago. Besides the Moon landing aspect, LUNR still has a lot going for it within the Near Space Network space from contracts awarded several months ago. This will help greatly in the long term.
LUNR has officially announced that its Q4 2024 earnings date will be on Monday, 3/24/2025. I'm very hopeful as we should see the exact dollar value of their contract backlog that should have grown greatly since its previous earnings reportings. Other than this, I expect mostly the rest to stay the same as the company still is not profitable, but has no debt and a decent amount of cash on hand, and is expected to maintain that standpoint for the next 2-3 years.
That's all for this update!
