Intuitive Machines ($LUNR) Stock Hub 2026: Q2 Earnings on August 13, the Lanteris-Powered Revenue Step-Up and the Backlog That Follows It

01 Next scheduled event: second quarter 2026 results on August 13, 2026

This is the only confirmed dated event on the near-term calendar. On July 28, 2026 Intuitive Machines announced that it will release financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2026 on Thursday, August 13, 2026, before the market opens, and that management will host the earnings conference call the same day at 8:30 a.m. ET. The pattern is consistent with the company’s recent practice: first quarter 2026 results were released before the open on May 14, 2026, and second quarter 2025 results before the open on August 7, 2025, each followed by an 8:30 a.m. ET call.

Direct links: the earnings-date announcement of July 28, 2026 · Intuitive Machines investor relations · quarterly results archive · SEC filings on EDGAR.

02 Executive summary

Intuitive Machines spent 2023 to 2025 as a lunar lander company with a small revenue base, a single dominant customer and two Moon landings that both ended on their side. It spent the first eight months of 2026 becoming something structurally different: a vertically integrated space infrastructure contractor with a spacecraft factory, a ground-station network on two continents and a revenue base roughly four times larger.

Three transactions did most of that work. Lanteris Space Systems, formerly Maxar Space Systems, closed on January 13, 2026 for total consideration of $851.0 million and contributed $141.6 million of revenue in the twelve-and-a-bit weeks it was owned during the first quarter. KinetX closed on October 1, 2025. Goonhilly Earth Station and COMSAT closed on August 3, 2026, adding deep-space ground infrastructure in the United Kingdom and the United States for £37.0 million plus a $10 million base cash price for the COMSAT entity.

The operating result is visible and verifiable. First quarter 2026 revenue was $186.73 million against $62.52 million a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA was positive $2.67 million against negative $6.61 million. Contracted backlog went from $213.07 million at December 31, 2025 to $1,055.43 million at March 31, 2026. Customer concentration fell from one customer at 78% of revenue in the first quarter of 2025 to four customers at 36%, 26%, 13% and 13% in the first quarter of 2026.

The cost of that transformation is equally visible. Cash and cash equivalents fell from $582.61 million at December 31, 2025 to $231.62 million at March 31, 2026. Free cash flow, as the company defines it, was negative $64.64 million in the quarter. Class A shares outstanding went from 121.28 million at December 31, 2025 to 159.82 million at March 31, 2026, and a new at-the-market program with capacity of up to $500 million became effective on June 2, 2026. Shareholders’ deficit attributable to the company was $334.30 million at March 31, 2026.

Anyone reading the August 13 release should sort the new information into four buckets, because commentary on this stock routinely mixes them: what is contracted, funded and in backlog; what is an awarded task order not yet fully funded; what is a maximum contract ceiling on a shared vehicle; and what is a proposal or an ambition with no contract behind it. Intuitive Machines has genuine items in all four columns. The third column contains the two largest numbers the company has ever put in a press release.

03 Market Data And Peer Comparison

Price and performance figures below are based on the completed session of Friday, August 7, 2026. Float, ownership, short interest, average volume and the consensus target are from Finviz, pulled on the same date. Company financial figures come from SEC filings and company releases, each carrying its own reference date.

Peer comparison, all figures at the August 7, 2026 close

The July supply event is the context for the price series above: Advent International sold 11,495,514 shares on July 28 at $12.84, half of the stock it received in the Lanteris transaction. A seller of that size disclosed in public filings explains part of a de-rating that coincided with revenue roughly tripling year over year.

On analyst coverage the honest position is a narrow one. The consensus target above is a Finviz aggregate of third-party estimates pulled on August 7, 2026. Individual houses, ratings and note dates were not verified for this update, so no coverage table is presented. A consensus figure without named notes behind it is a market-data point, not research, and it is neither a company figure nor a Merlintrader forecast.

04 Verified developments up to August 4, 2026

Intuitive Machines closed the acquisition of Goonhilly Earth Station Limited, a ground-station and satellite communications company registered in England and Wales, for aggregate consideration of £37.0 million split equally between cash and stock, with the stock portion being 960,649 shares of Class A common stock. On the same day a wholly owned subsidiary acquired all of the membership interests of COMSAT LLC, formerly Goonhilly Inc., for a base cash purchase price of $10 million plus expense reimbursement, subject to adjustments and a post-closing true-up. Both were disclosed in a Form 8-K filed August 3, 2026. The company said it intends to use the enlarged network for the upcoming IM-3 and Altus-1 missions.

A Form 4 filed on July 29 reported that Advent International sold 11,495,514 shares of Class A common stock on July 28, 2026 at $12.84, leaving 11,495,514 shares held indirectly. Advent received 22,991,028 shares as part of the Lanteris consideration in January. The form was filed with the box checked indicating the reporting person is no longer subject to Section 16, which is what happens when a holder drops below the 10% threshold.

The company announced that second quarter 2026 results will be released before the market opens on August 13, 2026, with the conference call the same morning at 8:30 a.m. ET.

NASA said it had delivered its NavCube3-mini navigation payload to Intuitive Machines for integration into Altus-1, the first satellite of the planned lunar relay constellation being built under the Near Space Network Services contract. This is a hardware milestone on the contract that carries the company’s largest headline number.

NASA awarded Intuitive Machines a firm-fixed-price Commercial Lunar Payload Services task order valued at up to $148.3 million, described by the company as scaling Nova-C production to provide repeatable delivery as a service. It is the company’s sixth CLPS task order, the most of any CLPS vendor.

Shareholders elected the two Class III director nominees, Dr. Kamal Ghaffarian and Stephen Altemus, and ratified Grant Thornton LLP as auditor for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2026. Ghaffarian received 195,999,331 votes for and 22,328,731 against; Altemus received 207,762,049 for and 10,566,013 against.

A shelf registration statement became effective on June 2, 2026 covering the sale from time to time of Class A common stock for aggregate gross proceeds of up to $500.0 million. The sales agreement with ten agents, including Barclays, Cantor Fitzgerald, Deutsche Bank, KeyBanc and Stifel, was filed on Form 8-K on June 3, 2026, with commissions of up to 3.0% of the sales price.

At its Moon Base event NASA announced $219 million to Astrolab and $220 million to Lunar Outpost under the Phase 1 High Achievability Mission task orders of the Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract. Intuitive Machines, which led the Moon RACER team and held a Phase 1 feasibility award from 2024, was not among the selected providers. The same release confirmed that the Lunar Vertex investigation will fly on the company’s Nova-C lander Trinity, designated Moon Base III and described by NASA as targeted for 2026.

The company became prime contractor for operations of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera under a $15.5 million cost-plus-fixed-fee three-year contract, and for the ShadowCam instrument on the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter under a $4.5 million three-year contract. Small in dollars, relevant in kind: the imagery involved supports navigation for the Reiner Gamma landing site.

Record quarterly revenue of $186.7 million, first positive Adjusted EBITDA of $2.7 million, record backlog of $1,055.4 million, cash of $231.6 million, and the full-year 2026 forecast of $900 million to $1 billion of revenue with positive Adjusted EBITDA. The same day the company signed the definitive agreement to acquire Goonhilly Earth Station and COMSAT.

The initial NASA payload contract for the IM-5 mission was awarded in March 2026 with an initial targeted launch of mid-2030. As of March 31, 2026 the company carried total estimated IM-5 revenue under fixed-price contracts of $161.4 million, excluding a further $16.2 million to $18.3 million of constrained consideration. This is the award the company describes publicly as a $180.4 million CLPS contract and its fifth task order, and the first requiring the larger Nova-D cargo lander.

The company completed the issuance and sale of 11,574,069 shares of Class A common stock at $15.12 per share for aggregate proceeds of $175.0 million under a securities purchase agreement.

Total consideration transferred at closing was $851.0 million: $403.3 million in cash, $43.7 million of transaction bonuses deemed part of consideration, and 22,991,028 shares of Class A common stock valued at $404.0 million using the acquisition-date closing price of $17.57. The cash was funded from cash on hand. Goodwill of $361.1 million was recognized. Lanteris contributed $141.6 million of revenue and $0.2 million of operating income between January 13 and March 31, 2026.

05 The revenue step-up, quarter by quarter

The single most important thing to understand about the August 13 release is that the revenue line is not the same company it was a year ago. Through 2025 quarterly revenue drifted between $44.8 million and $62.5 million. In the first quarter of 2026 it was $186.7 million, and $141.6 million of that came from a business acquired twelve days into the quarter.

Total revenue by quarter, $ millions

Source: Intuitive Machines Form 10-Q filings and the Form 10-K for 2025. Quarterly 2025 figures are derived from the reported year-to-date totals in those filings ($62.524M, $112.837M, $165.274M and $210.059M). Bar widths are percentages of the $186.73 million maximum.

Full-year revenue was $228.0 million in 2024 and $210.1 million in 2025, a decline. The forecast for 2026 is $900 million to $1 billion. That is not organic growth; it is consolidation arithmetic plus execution. The distinction matters when judging the quarters that follow.

Annual revenue and the 2026 forecast, $ millions

Source: Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025 for the actuals, and the outlook section of the first quarter 2026 earnings release of May 14, 2026 for the forecast range. Bar widths are percentages of $1,000 million.

06 What the company actually is now: one segment, three pillars

Intuitive Machines reports as a single operating and reportable segment. In its own words in the first quarter Form 10-Q, that segment is “underpinned by three core pillars (delivery services, data transmission services, and infrastructure as a service) that have similar capabilities, customers, and economic characteristics.” The chief operating decision maker is the chief executive officer, and the measures reviewed are net income or loss, Adjusted EBITDA and total assets.

The Nova-C and larger Nova-D lunar landers flown under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Five task orders had been awarded through the first quarter of 2026 and a sixth on June 30, 2026. This is the pillar with the longest public record and, so far, the worst contract economics: IM-3 has been accounted for as a loss contract since 2021 and IM-4 became one during the second quarter of 2025.

The lunar relay constellation being built under the Near Space Network Services contract, plus the ground network. At March 31, 2026 construction in progress included $66.7 million of capitalized costs for the fabrication and development of communications satellites and ground network assets, primarily for that contract. The Goonhilly and COMSAT acquisition on August 3, 2026 attached a physical antenna estate to this pillar.

Engineering services and spacecraft manufacturing. This is where OMES III at NASA Goddard sits, executed through the Space Network Solutions joint venture with KBR, and where Lanteris now sits: geostationary communications satellites, weather and Earth-observation spacecraft, and satellite buses for national security programs.

The customer mix changed shape completely in one quarter. In the first quarter of 2025 civil customers, essentially NASA, were 83% of revenue and a single customer accounted for 78% of the total. In the first quarter of 2026 the split was civil 38%, commercial 33% and national security 27%, with four customers each above the 10% disclosure threshold at 36%, 26%, 13% and 13%.

First quarter 2026 revenue by customer type, $ millions

Source: Note 4 to the Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026. The three customer categories total $183.63 million of revenue from contracts with customers; grant revenue of $3.10 million brings total revenue to $186.73 million. Bar widths are percentages of the $71.673 million maximum.

Within the $141.6 million Lanteris contribution, the filing names the largest programs: the Tracking Layer program at $39.5 million, the Power and Propulsion Element at $30.6 million, commercial satellite contracts related to EchoStar at $23.7 million and a government defense contract at $7.7 million. Contract mix also shifted: 87% of first quarter 2026 revenue came from fixed-price contracts, against 61% a year earlier, with cost-reimbursable work falling from 36% to 10%. Fixed price means the margin belongs to the contractor when execution goes well and to nobody when it does not.

07 Financial position at March 31, 2026

Source: Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026 and the first quarter 2026 earnings release of May 14, 2026. Gross profit is not a line item in the company’s income statement; the figures shown are total revenue less the four disclosed cost-of-revenue lines, all of which exclude depreciation and amortization, and the percentages are calculated from those amounts. Adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow are non-GAAP measures defined by the company and reconciled in that release.

The balance sheet has two features that look alarming out of context and are largely structural. The first is the shareholders’ deficit, which is a consequence of the umbrella partnership C corporation structure and the remeasurement of redeemable noncontrolling interests, not of accumulated cash losses alone. The second is that redeemable noncontrolling interests of $1,057.8 million sit in mezzanine equity, above the deficit; they represent the 26.3% of Intuitive Machines, LLC common units still held by the pre-listing investors.

Cash and cash equivalents at quarter end, $ millions

Source: quarterly and annual SEC filings. The step up in the third quarter of 2025 reflects the $345.0 million convertible note issue of August 18, 2025; the fall in the first quarter of 2026 reflects $444.8 million of cash used for acquisitions, net of cash acquired, partly offset by $175.0 million of equity issued in February. Bar widths are percentages of the $621.975 million maximum.

What to watch in the August 13 print

• Revenue against $199.85 million, the pro forma first quarter figure, rather than against the reported $186.73 million. The second quarter is the first to include a full three months of Lanteris.
• Gross profit excluding depreciation and amortization. The first quarter came in at 16.1%. Lanteris arrives with a different margin profile from lunar delivery, and the mix will start to settle.
• Adjusted EBITDA. The first quarter figure of positive $2.67 million was struck after adding back $19.98 million of transaction and integration costs. Those costs should fall; whether the underlying number improves with them is the question.
• Cash. $231.6 million at March 31, less the cash portion of the Goonhilly and COMSAT purchases, less any further free cash outflow, plus whatever has been raised under the at-the-market program.
• The cover page of the Form 10-Q, which gives the Class A, Class B and Class C counts as of a date in early August. That single line will say more about dilution than the whole press release.
• Backlog, and whether the full-year revenue range is repeated unchanged.

08 Backlog: the number, and exactly what it means

Contracted backlog was $1,055.4 million at March 31, 2026 against $213.1 million at December 31, 2025. The company rounds it to $1.1 billion in its headlines. Its own definition, taken verbatim from the first quarter release, is this: “contracted backlog, which is defined as the total estimate of the revenue the Company expects to realize in the future as a result of performing work on awarded contracts, less the amount of revenue the Company has previously recognized.”

Read carefully, that definition is broader than the accounting measure sitting a few pages away in the same filing. Remaining performance obligations, the figure prepared under revenue-recognition rules, were $792.3 million at the same date. The company explains the $263.1 million difference itself: $44.3 million relates to variable consideration that is constrained, and $65.9 million relates to the funded value of the OMES III contract, the Near Space Network contract and other agreements where revenue is recognized as services are performed and become contractually billable, and which therefore do not appear as remaining performance obligations.

How backlog got to $1,055.4 million, $ millions

Source: the first quarter 2026 earnings release of May 14, 2026 and Note 4 to the Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026. Bar widths are percentages of the $1,055.434 million closing figure. The company states that backlog increased by $842.4 million in the quarter, which reconciles exactly to the $213.07 million opening and $1,055.434 million closing balances. The three drivers it names add to $855.0 million, or $12.6 million more than the stated increase, because the release describes them as the primary components rather than a complete itemization.

The conversion profile is disclosed and is unusually front-loaded. Of the $792.3 million of remaining performance obligations, the company expects to recognize approximately 60% to 65% over the remaining nine months of 2026, 25% to 30% in 2027 and the rest over the following three years. Sixty percent of $792.3 million is $475.4 million, and 65% is $515.0 million. Add the first quarter’s $186.7 million and the top of that band reaches roughly $702 million of the $900 million to $1 billion forecast from remaining performance obligations alone, with the balance expected to come from the cost-reimbursable and time-and-materials work that is excluded from that measure and from awards not yet booked.

Two qualifications belong with the backlog figure. First, $612.8 million of it, or 58%, arrived through an acquisition rather than through winning work; that is legitimate backlog, but it says nothing about the win rate of the legacy business. Second, backlog excludes unexercised contract options, which is stated in the filing and is the correct treatment, and it is a company-defined measure that is not audited and is not comparable across contractors.

09 Capital structure: three share classes, a convertible, warrants and an at-the-market program

This is where the arithmetic gets genuinely complicated, and where most published share counts for $LUNR go wrong.

The three classes

Intuitive Machines is organized as an umbrella partnership C corporation. The listed entity is a holding company whose only material asset is its equity interest in Intuitive Machines, LLC, which holds the business. At March 31, 2026 the capital table looked like this:

As of May 7, 2026, the cover page of the Form 10-Q reported 160,452,309 Class A shares, zero Class B and 56,568,640 Class C outstanding. The Class C count falls and the Class A count rises whenever a holder exchanges LLC units, which happens regularly: on July 27, 2026 alone, a Form 4 reported the conversion of 47,303 Class C shares into Class A and their sale the same day at $13.2001.

The holders of those LLC units, described in the filings as the prior investors of Intuitive Machines, LLC, owned 26.3% of the outstanding common units at March 31, 2026 and have the right to exchange them, together with cancellation of the paired Class B or Class C shares, for Class A shares on a one-for-one basis, or for cash if the board approves and the cash is funded by an offering of Class A stock. That right is solely within the control of the holder.

The instruments above the share count

• Convertible notes. $345.0 million principal of 2.500% convertible senior notes due October 1, 2030, issued August 18, 2025. The initial conversion rate is 76.2631 Class A shares per $1,000 principal, an initial conversion price of approximately $13.1125 per share. Full conversion would represent about 26.3 million Class A shares. The company may settle in cash, stock or a combination, at its election, and may not redeem before October 6, 2028.
• Conversion Series A warrants. 4,150,780 shares at an exercise price of $2.57, issued in the January 2024 bridge loan conversion and later assigned to a third-party investor. None had been exercised at March 31, 2026. They are carried as a liability, valued at $69.8 million, which is why a $9.4 million non-cash loss ran through the first quarter income statement.
• Preferred investor warrants. 706,522 shares at $11.50, after an anti-dilution adjustment from the original $15.00. None exercised. Classified in equity.
• At-the-market program. Up to $500.0 million of Class A stock, effective June 2, 2026, with agent commissions of up to 3.0%. The company has not disclosed how much, if anything, has been sold under it.
• Earn-out. The business-combination earn-out has already been settled: 7,500,000 Class C shares were issued in the first quarter of 2025 and the change in fair value of earn-out liabilities was nil in the first quarter of 2026. It is no longer an overhang.

The share ladder: what exists, and what could exist, in millions of Class A-equivalent shares

Sources: Form 10-Q cover page and Notes 12 and 13 for the quarter ended March 31, 2026 (Class A and Class C as of May 7, 2026; warrant terms), Note 10 for the convertible note conversion rate, and the Form 8-K of August 3, 2026 for the 960,649 Goonhilly consideration shares. Bar widths are percentages of the 249.1 million total. The Series A preferred is excluded because the filings do not disclose its stated value, so the as-converted count cannot be calculated from public data; it is small. Any shares sold under the at-the-market program, or issued for vesting equity awards after May 7, are additional and not yet disclosed.

Two consequences follow. The first is that the market capitalization quoted by data vendors, about $2.84 billion at the August 3 close, already includes the Class C shares: it is 217.0 million shares multiplied by $13.10, not the 160.5 million Class A shares alone. That is the right approach economically, and it means the headline number is not understating the equity base. The second is that on a fully as-converted basis the count is roughly 249.1 million, about 15% above the 217.0 million used in that market capitalization, before any use of the $500 million at-the-market program.

The convertible note conversion price of $13.1125 is worth a second look, because on August 3, 2026 the stock closed at $13.10. The notes are, for practical purposes, sitting exactly at the money. The contractual conversion conditions are not met at that level, since the principal early-conversion trigger requires the stock to trade at or above 130% of the conversion price, around $17.05, for twenty of thirty consecutive trading days in a quarter. But the note is now a live part of the share-count question rather than a distant one.

10 Funded task orders, contract ceilings and option years: the three things that get mixed up

Intuitive Machines has been awarded some very large numbers. Almost none of them are revenue, and the difference between the categories is the single most useful thing a reader of this company’s press releases can learn.

A specific, priced instruction to do specific work, with money obligated against it. This is what goes into backlog and eventually into revenue. The CLPS mission contracts are of this type.

The maximum the government could spend under a vehicle across its whole life, often shared among several vendors. No company is entitled to any of it. Winning a place on the vehicle earns the right to bid for task orders under it.

A period the customer may or may not exercise. Ceilings routinely quote the total across base and option periods, which is how a five-year contract becomes a ten-year headline.

Near Space Network Services: $4.82 billion ceiling, $150 million funded at award

This is the contract behind the largest number the company publishes, and its own press release title is precise about the distinction: NASA awarded the Near Space Network contract “with a Maximum Potential Value of $4.82 Billion”. It is a firm-fixed-price, multiple-award, indefinite-delivery indefinite-quantity task-order contract for lunar relay services, awarded by NASA Goddard on September 17, 2024. The base ordering period runs five years to September 30, 2029, with a further five-year option period that could extend it to September 30, 2034. The initial award consisted of incrementally funded task orders totaling $150 million.

Progress on it is real and physical. At March 31, 2026 the company had $66.7 million of construction in progress capitalized for communications satellites and ground network assets, primarily for this contract. Altus-1, the first of a planned five-satellite relay constellation, is being integrated, and NASA said in July 2026 that it had delivered the NavCube3-mini navigation payload for it. The company plans to fly Altus-1 with the IM-3 mission and two further relay satellites with IM-4. Funding for the satellites beyond those already ordered has not been disclosed.

Andromeda: an anticipated ceiling of $6.2 billion, no disclosed task order

In the first quarter release the company said it had “Contracted with U.S. Space Force in Q2 as a part of the Andromeda IDIQ contract with an anticipated ceiling value of $6.2 billion to expand space domain awareness capabilities through a constellation of maneuverable satellites designed to observe and track activity in geosynchronous orbit; the first revenue synergy award to combine Intuitive Machines and Lanteris capabilities.” Every load-bearing word there is a qualifier: as a part of, anticipated, ceiling. Andromeda is a multiple-award vehicle. The company has not issued a standalone press release on it, has not disclosed a task-order value, and has not said what share of the vehicle it expects. Until a funded order is announced, $6.2 billion is the size of the pot, not the size of the plate.

OMES III: a $719 million ceiling, held through a joint venture

The Omnibus Multidiscipline Engineering Services III contract at NASA Goddard is a cost-plus-fixed-fee, single-award indefinite-delivery indefinite-quantity contract with a maximum ordering value of $719 million, awarded to Space Network Solutions, a joint venture. The Government Accountability Office upheld the award on protest in August 2023. The economics are shared: the joint venture agreement gives Intuitive Machines a 47% profits interest and KBR 53%. The company consolidates the entity as the primary beneficiary of a variable interest entity; at March 31, 2026 it had total assets of $11.6 million and total liabilities of $8.6 million. In the first quarter the joint venture incurred $5.4 million of cost of revenue with KBR. OMES III revenue is recognized as services are performed, which is why part of its funded value sits in backlog but not in remaining performance obligations.

The CLPS missions: contract values that are real

These are the numbers that behave like revenue, and the Form 10-Q states each one as total estimated revenue under fixed-price contracts, excluding constrained consideration.

Estimated contract revenue by lunar mission at March 31, 2026, $ millions

Sources: management’s discussion in the Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026 for IM-3, IM-4 and IM-5, each stated excluding constrained revenue of $9.7 million, $16.2 million and $18.3 million respectively; and the company press release of June 30, 2026 for the sixth award, which is stated as a value of up to $148.3 million. Bar widths are percentages of $161.4 million.

11 The lunar program: what happened, and what is scheduled

IM-1, February 2024

The Nova-C lander Odysseus launched on February 15, 2024 and touched down near Malapert A on February 22, the first American soft lunar landing since 1972 and the first ever by a commercial company. It did not land upright. The lander’s laser rangefinders were inoperable because a safety switch had not been disabled before launch; engineers rerouted altimetry from a NASA payload, the Navigation Doppler Lidar, but a data-validity flag was not set, so that substitute data went unused as well. Without valid altimetry the lander came down faster than planned and about 1.5 kilometers off target on sloping ground, broke a leg and tipped over, coming to rest against a boulder. It communicated for around seven days. NASA said it received data from all six of its payloads and both parties called the mission a success.

IM-2, February and March 2025

The lander Athena launched February 26, 2025 and landed on March 6 near Mons Mouton, closer to the lunar South Pole than any spacecraft before it, but again on its side and roughly 250 meters from the intended point. Operations ended at 1:15 a.m. ET on March 7, less than a day after touchdown, when the batteries were exhausted because the solar panels were badly oriented in extreme cold. On the first quarter 2025 earnings call management gave three contributing causes: noise or interference affecting the laser altimeter; long shadows and a low sun angle at the pole degrading the optical crater-matching navigation; and reference imagery taken from 100 kilometers altitude not representing what the descending lander’s cameras actually saw. Boulder-avoidance maneuvers left the vehicle in the wrong attitude at touchdown.

The stated changes for the next attempt are specific: redundant laser rangefinders from two different vendors, a surface-velocity sensor that does not depend on lighting, an expanded onboard crater-map library including imagery captured during the IM-2 descent, and up to twelve lunar orbits before landing instead of three, to allow more sensor calibration time. The financial trace of these missions is in the filings too. The IM-2 contract was closed out in the third quarter of 2025 with about $5.5 million of revenue recognized.

IM-3

The initial NASA payload contract was awarded in November 2021 with an initial targeted launch date no later than June 2024. It has slipped repeatedly. The Form 10-Q states that the mission timeline runs through March 2027 and that the contract was approximately 89% complete at March 31, 2026. NASA’s own Moon Base release of May 26, 2026 designates the mission Moon Base III, describes it as “also targeted for this year”, and confirms that its anchor investigation, Lunar Vertex, will fly on “Intuitive Machine’s Nova-C Trinity lunar lander” to study lunar swirls, with payloads from the European Space Agency and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute also aboard. The landing site is the Reiner Gamma swirl. Altus-1, the first relay satellite, is planned to fly with it.

The contract economics are poor and disclosed as such. IM-3 has been accounted for as a loss contract since 2021 because estimated costs exceed expected consideration. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, changes in estimated contract costs added a further $2.8 million to that loss. The remaining loss provision recorded in current contract liabilities was $5.2 million at March 31, 2026, down from $6.5 million at year end.

IM-4

Awarded in August 2024, with an initial targeted launch date no later than August 2028. The company’s stated expectation in the first quarter Form 10-Q is that the launch will occur “during the second half of 2027”. Total estimated revenue under fixed-price contracts is $124.5 million excluding $16.2 million of constrained consideration, and the contract was approximately 42% complete at March 31, 2026. It became a loss contract during the second quarter of 2025; the recorded loss provision was $0.5 million at both March 31, 2026 and December 31, 2025, and the first quarter of 2026 brought a small favorable revision of $51 thousand. The mission is to the South Pole and is planned to carry the European Space Agency’s PROSPECT drill package to look for water ice, along with two further relay satellites.

IM-5 and the sixth award

The IM-5 payload contract was awarded in March 2026 with an initial targeted launch of mid-2030 and carries the highest estimated contract revenue of the set at $161.4 million. It is the first mission requiring the larger Nova-D cargo lander. The sixth CLPS award of June 30, 2026, worth up to $148.3 million, is framed by the company as a production-line award rather than a bespoke mission: standard, repeatable delivery as a service.

The Lunar Terrain Vehicle: a loss that has been decided

In April 2024 NASA selected three teams for Lunar Terrain Vehicle feasibility work. Intuitive Machines led the Moon RACER team with AVL, Boeing, Michelin and Northrop Grumman and received a Phase 1 feasibility award of approximately $30 million. The program was restructured in 2026 towards a simpler rover on a faster timeline, and on May 26, 2026 NASA awarded the Phase 1 High Achievability Mission task orders under the Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract to Astrolab, at $219 million, and Lunar Outpost, at $220 million. Intuitive Machines was not selected. NASA said it will “expand opportunities for additional vendors through on-ramp competitions”, so the door is not permanently closed, but the first production money has been allocated elsewhere. In the same May 14 release in which it reported first quarter results, the company had said it was awaiting award decisions on both CLPS and LTV proposals. It won the CLPS one in June and did not win the LTV one in May.

12 Lanteris, Goonhilly and the shape of the combined company

Lanteris Space Systems is the former Maxar Space Systems, bought from Advent International and closed on January 13, 2026. It is a long-established spacecraft manufacturer in California with a heritage of geostationary communications satellites built on the 1300-series bus, plus newer smaller platforms used for Earth observation and for national security constellations. Its first-quarter contribution to Intuitive Machines was $141.6 million of revenue and $0.2 million of operating income, on programs the filing identifies as the Tracking Layer, the Power and Propulsion Element, EchoStar commercial satellites and a government defense contract.

The accounting consideration was $851.0 million: $403.3 million cash, $43.7 million of transaction bonuses treated as consideration, and 22,991,028 Class A shares valued at $404.0 million at the acquisition-date closing price of $17.57. Goodwill of $361.1 million was recognized, taking total goodwill to $379.8 million. On July 28, 2026 Advent sold exactly half of its consideration shares at $12.84, a price 27% below the value at which they were issued.

Goonhilly Earth Station and COMSAT closed on August 3, 2026. Goonhilly is a British deep-space and satellite communications ground station; COMSAT is its United States counterpart. The company had said when it signed in May that the transaction would add antennas to its space-to-Earth network and support position, navigation and timing, data relay and deep-space communications, and that it intends to use the enlarged network for the IM-3 and Altus-1 missions. Consideration was £37.0 million for the UK entity, half cash and half in 960,649 Class A shares, plus a $10 million base cash price for COMSAT with a post-closing true-up. The transaction is small in dollars and strategically coherent: a relay constellation without ground stations is a satellite with nobody to talk to.

What has changed for the equity story is the character of the revenue. Lunar delivery is episodic, binary and, on the two contracts disclosed as loss-making, unprofitable. Spacecraft manufacturing and ground services are recurring, capacity-constrained and priced on program execution. The first quarter of 2026 is the first time the second type dominated.

13 Management and governance

The company was founded in 2013 by three people who are all still involved: Stephen Altemus, Dr. Kamal Ghaffarian and Dr. Timothy Crain.

The board is classified into three staggered classes, which means only part of it stands for election in any year. Grant Thornton LLP was ratified as auditor for the year ending December 31, 2026 with 246,639,121 votes for and 280,218 against. The related-party landscape is unusually dense and is disclosed in detail: KBR is the joint-venture partner in Space Network Solutions and also a counterparty for engineering services; ASES, a joint venture between Aerodyne and KBR, is another affiliate, and Ghaffarian is a member of management at Aerodyne Industries. Affiliated-party service costs ran at $5.9 million in the first quarter of 2026. These arrangements are lawful and disclosed, and they are also a reason to read the related-party note rather than skip it.

14 Ownership, Short Interest And Retail Sentiment

Ownership is concentrated and the picture is complicated by the share classes. Finviz Elite reported insider ownership of 20.08% and institutional ownership of 81.88% on August 4, 2026; those percentages are calculated on different bases and should not be added together.

The primary-source picture is clearer. In Amendment No. 12 to his Schedule 13D, filed July 7, 2026 for an event dated July 2, 2026, Dr. Kamal Ghaffarian reported beneficial ownership of 38,429,036 shares, or 19.7% of the class, of which 146,092 shares carry sole voting and dispositive power and 38,282,944 are shared. Ghaffarian Enterprises, LLC reported 36,041,823 shares. Form 4 filings through July 2026 show a repeating pattern: Class C shares converted into Class A and sold the same day under a trading plan intended to satisfy the affirmative-defense conditions of Rule 10b5-1. The July 27, 2026 filing reported 47,303 shares converted and sold at $13.2001, with 34,629,897 Class C shares still held indirectly afterwards.

The other large holder was Advent International, which received 22,991,028 Class A shares as part of the Lanteris consideration in January 2026 and sold 11,495,514 of them on July 28, 2026 at $12.84, retaining an identical number. Its Form 4 was filed with the box checked to indicate it is no longer subject to Section 16 reporting.

A short position of 27% of the float is high in absolute terms and unremarkable for this cohort; several small and mid-cap space names carry similar readings. It has two practical consequences. It makes the stock reflexive around scheduled events, which is why the August 13 release is likely to produce an outsized move in either direction. And it means part of the daily volume is not an opinion about the business at all.

On retail sentiment, StockTwits showed a sentiment score of 30 out of 100 with a bearish label on August 4, 2026, on tagged messages running 68.05% bullish against 31.95% bearish, with the bullish share down 13.93 points on the period. These are self-reported views of non-professional participants on a social platform. They are not research, they are not verified, and they are included here only as a description of the retail conversation.

The block below is a snapshot of the Stocktwits flow, with its date. These are opinions of retail traders and non-professional investors, not analyst research, and they measure attention and how one-sided positioning has become rather than anything about the business.

15 Catalyst table

16 The two cases, stated as fairly as possible

In eighteen months Intuitive Machines has turned a $210 million lunar delivery business with one dominant customer into a roughly $900 million to $1 billion contractor with four customers above 10% of revenue, a $1.06 billion backlog, its first positive Adjusted EBITDA quarter, a spacecraft factory with decades of flight heritage, and a ground network on two continents. It holds more CLPS task orders than any competitor, a place on a $4.82 billion NASA relay contract with hardware already in integration, and a seat on a Space Force space-domain-awareness vehicle. Fixed-price work rose to 87% of revenue, which is where operating leverage lives if execution holds. If gross profit excluding depreciation climbs from 16.1% and the transaction costs that flattered nothing in the first quarter roll off, the company crosses into sustained positive Adjusted EBITDA during 2026 and the equity funding stops being a treadmill.

The growth was bought, not won: $612.8 million of the record backlog came in an acquisition, and $851.0 million of consideration and $175.0 million of fresh equity went out to get it. Cash fell 60% in a single quarter and free cash flow was negative $64.6 million. The Class A count rose 32% in three months and there is capacity for up to $500 million more under the new at-the-market program, on top of 26.3 million shares behind a convertible note now trading at its conversion price. The two flagship lunar contracts, IM-3 and IM-4, are both accounted for as loss contracts, and the delivery record is two landers on their sides. The largest headline numbers, $4.82 billion and $6.2 billion, are ceilings on shared vehicles, and the company was passed over for the first Lunar Terrain Vehicle production awards in May. Advent sold half its stake at a 27% discount to the price at which it was issued.

17 Scenario framework

These are analytical frameworks for organizing what the next few reporting periods could look like. They are not forecasts, targets or recommendations.

18 Merlintrader bottom line

Intuitive Machines goes into its August 13 print as a fundamentally different company from the one that landed Odysseus on its side in February 2024, and the market has spent three months marking it down by 47% anyway. Both facts are documented and they are not in conflict. What is being repriced is the cost of the acquisitions and the equity used to pay for them, not the existence of the platform they bought.

The evidence hierarchy for this stock is unusually easy to write down. Revenue of $186.7 million, backlog of $1,055.4 million, cash of $231.6 million and positive Adjusted EBITDA of $2.67 million are facts on a filed statement. The six CLPS task orders and the $150 million funded at the award of the Near Space Network contract are quantified orders. Andromeda’s anticipated $6.2 billion ceiling and the $4.82 billion maximum potential value of the relay contract are pots that several companies will draw from over a decade. The Lunar Terrain Vehicle, which the company pursued as prime contractor of the Moon RACER team, is now a program whose first production money has gone to two other firms. Anyone reading the August 13 release should sort the new information into those same four buckets before deciding what changed.

And the number that will say the most in the shortest time is not in the press release. It is on the cover page of the Form 10-Q, where the Class A, Class B and Class C share counts are printed.

For broader catalyst tracking across the space, defense and AI complex, the Merlintrader Free Catalyst Calendar lists the dated events for the sector.

Related Research On Merlintrader

• Space, Defense & AI Stock Hubs 2026: the new infrastructure race — the full index of company hubs in this sector.
• Intuitive Machines and the NASA award — earlier coverage of the contract that underpins the data transmission pillar.
• Rocket Lab ($RKLB) Stock Hub — the launch and spacecraft peer with a very different funding profile.
• Firefly Aerospace ($FLY) Stock Hub — another CLPS provider, and the builder selected for NASA’s MoonFall spacecraft.
• Redwire ($RDW) Stock Hub — a space infrastructure company running the same acquisition-plus-equity playbook.
• Why space stocks keep failing — background on why contract ceilings and revenue diverge in this sector.
• Dilution, ATMs and PIPEs: how equity funding actually works — background for the capital structure section above.
• Weekly Market Pulse — the week ahead across catalysts and earnings.