Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Intuitive Machines CEO on $800 Million Deal and Building a Lunar Communications Network 11/7/25

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Morgan Brennan sits down with Steve Altemus, CEO and co-founder of Intuitive Machine, a company known for lunar landings. But the company just bought Lanteris (formerly part of Maxar )to expand into multi-domain space and establish deep-space communications. Altemus explains how Intuitive Machines plans to own and operate a “Verizon from the Moon,” the next steps in its lunar landing missions, and how the ongoing government shutdown is affecting new space contracts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Intuitive machines announced to this week it will acquire satellite manufacturer Lanteris Space Systems for $800 million in cash in stock. Lanterris, formerly known as Maxar Space Systems, is owned by Advent International, and the deal makes the PE firm a significant shareholder of publicly traded intuitive machines. Intuitive machines may best be known for its commercial landers that it's sent to the moon for NASA, but CEO Steve Altimus says Lanteris, scalable production. of satellites that are highly reliable will, quote, feed the markets the company's going after. There's a whole series of layered networks that we plan to put in place in space from Leo to Mio to Geo to the moon and out to Mars. And then use that service for any of the other kind of observation satellites or specialty sensors that we need. for space domain awareness or for any of the national security space needs that might arise here in the near future.

So the key to the whole thing about opening up the space economy is about the communications and navigation. And if you can do that, you can place a spacecraft anywhere and communicate with it, bring the data back to Earth. And so the opportunities are nearly limitless for us once the network's in place. land terrorists helps us with that, putting reliable satellites in places that we need to go. Intuitive machines recently won a $4.8 billion NASA contract to begin building out part of this commercial network. Like other contractors, the companies also navigating the government shutdown

with the main impact the delay in new awards, since those contracts can't be doled out until the government reopens. As for the stock, after its own trip to the moon, shares of lunar have back to Earth, following some 22% this week and giving up post-election gains to now be slightly down over the past 12 months. On this episode, Intuitive Machines, Steve Altimus, on the deal to buy Lance Harris and what it signals about where the space economy is heading. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now, Steve Altimus, the CEO of Intuitive Machines, and Steve, it's always great to speak with you. Welcome. Thank you, Morgan. It's great to see you again.

and talk with you. Thanks for having me on. All right. So you just had a big week. You announced an acquisition. Let's talk about it. Yes. I think it's a transformative acquisition of Lanteris space systems, which is formerly Maxar Space Systems, Intuitive Machines entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Lanteris for approximately $800 million in a mix of cash and equity. And so we'll have Advent with us, the owners, as a shareholder, sizable shareholder of Intuitive machines going forward, which is a great endorsement of the upside and potential of this deal. And so Lanteris is max our, but when it was taken private by Advent, it was then split in part

into two businesses. And then just recently those businesses were renamed, rebranded, Lanteris being one of them. So we're talking about hardware, right? What does this bring to the portfolio for intuitive machines? Such an incredible, scalable production capability that we will use at intuitive machines to feed our markets. You know, the growth that we're experiencing in our markets, and I'll talk about that shortly here, to use their production and scalable satellite production lines really, does feed the markets we're going after and they have this incredible reliability record for

on orbit availability of their satellites a 99.99% uptime on the satellites is just a class leading performance. So we take that scale and that reliability or availability and we put it into our markets. Mainly the near space network, you know we won recent. recently the Near Space Network Services contract with NASA. And that's a $4.8 billion contract. And it's communicating from the ground all the way out to 2 million kilometers. And we're the commercial network to provide that service for the U.S. government. So that requires a constellation of data relay satellites around the moon and position

navigation and timing services within that constellation. So I'm going to outfit satellites around the moon from the Lanteris portfolio of satellites eventually. Very cool. And of course, when I think of intuitive machines, I think about lunar landers, I think about lunar infrastructure. You just talked about the fact that you're seeing growth across the portfolio. Let's dig into that a little bit. Oh, yes. We started with the hard things, right? So landing on the South Pole of the Moon, and also putting a daily relay satellites around the moon and then a ground segment. So once we have the communications network and the ability to deploy with precision spacecraft

in the vicinity of the moon, we can actually move down towards geosynchronous orbit and low Earth orbit and proliferated low Earth orbit and put constellations of satellites all the way out from that low Earth orbit all the way out to the moon, and then essentially turn our attention to Mars data relay satellites. So there's a whole series of layered networks that we plan to put in place in space from Leo to Mio to Geo to the moon and out to Mars. And then use that service for any of the other kind of observation satellites or specialty sensors that we need for space domain awareness

or for any of the national security space needs that might arise here in the near future. So the key to the whole thing about opening up the space economy is about the communications and navigation. And if you can do that, you can place a spacecraft anywhere and communicate with it, bring the data back, to Earth and so the opportunities are nearly limitless for us once the network's in place.

And Lanteris helps us with that putting reliable satellites in places that we need to go to. So in light of that, how quickly, and I guess via Lanteris it sounds like, can you start to actually launch and deploy these constellation of satellites? Well, already before this acquisition, we were working on, if you recall, during the quarter to earnings, I brought manufacturing of the lunar satellites in-house and began building the first three satellites. Those three satellites, the first one will go in the second half of 26. Pardon me. The next two will go in the second half of 2027. Those are intuitive machine satellites. And then for satellites four and five, I anticipate that they're going to need to be much

more capable. The customers indicating there are a lot of interested parties that want to put specialty payloads on those birds around the moon. So I think we're going to leverage Lanteris's capability to produce the larger satellites that will go into the constellation for satellites four and five around the moon. So now you work with NASA to do this. But is it a situation where you basically own the hardware, operate the constellations, and then offer those constellations as a service? Is that how to think about that for the future, especially if there's other applications above and beyond NASA to national security and other things? Yes, that's exactly right. The idea here is that we take and are not just a satellite provider. We're a provider

of the communications and navigation service so commercially we own the entire network from the ground segment around the world to the data relay constellation around the moon and that model will proliferate throughout the layers of space that I discussed but we'll own all the assets and all the hardware and then we'll sell in much higher margins we'll sell the time on the network in terms of, you know, minutes, right, data minutes. So think of us like a Verizon from the moon all the way back to Earth and from Earth all the way out to 2 million kilometers. So that service is really what we bring to the table

as opposed to just a product developer. So how does that compare, I guess, longer term, when you think about the business and what's driving revenue, what's driving growth? I mean, this seems like a huge opportunity. Maybe near term, it's landers, it's rovers, but longer term, is it the network and then selling the services? Well, the business, yes, in some sense, the business is delivery services to land things on the surface of the moon or put things in orbits in and around the moon or out in the deep space. The second pillar of the business is really where the expansion is occurring right now, and that is in the data services.

So that's the networks and the navigation and the ability to move those networks to different regions of space down into geosynchronous orbit and down into medium Earth orbit and low Earth orbit. And then the third pillar of the business is infrastructure as a service. And if you recall, we put in a proposal for the demonstration of the lunar terrain vehicle service contract to deliver the, the LTV or the moon buggy, the rover, to the surface of the moon, and operate it autonomously. So that takes delivery service to get it there, development of the infrastructure, the LTV itself, and it takes the network and the data flow back and forth to operate it autonomously. So we have all three pieces into the company, and then we'll apply that to that LTV contract, which we expect an award as early as next week.

Oh, interesting. Okay. I do want to talk about the lunar landers specifically because you've now sent two landers to the moon over the last couple of years. Neither mission went quite according to plan. And so I do want to get your thoughts on that, what you've learned from both of those missions and how it sets you up for the next ones. Oh, yes. We landed twice on the South Pole of the Moon and we had, you know, the landers on their side at the end of the mission. And that's not the desirable point. You want to land with softly, with precision. And so we had identified the root cause of the problems in a laser range finder. That gives you the distance to the surface of the moon. We've subsequently re-architected the precision landing and hazard avoidance software and sensors so that we can land softly and land with precision.

And we are in the middle of testing those sensors in helicopter flights where you fly the sensors and you fire the lasers, you get a reflection back, and you feed it into the software and the algorithms to see if it works. Then also we run long-distance thermal vacuum chamber with the sensors to show that they're going to operate in the vacuum of space at temperature. So that test is coming up shortly. And we're set for launch on IM3 with all the corrections that we put in place from IM2 for the latter half of 2026. And what will happen is on that mission, we move that mission slightly out in the calendar year to marry up the data relay satellite for the moon, which will go on the same ride, SpaceX ride with the lander and head out towards the moon. So I get a bang for the buck where I can

deploy a satellite and a lander to the moon in that mission three. Right now currently we're experiencing here in the U.S. the longest ever government shutdown. How are you navigating it? Well, yes, that's quite inconvenient for a lot of people. We've been given authorization to continue all of our contracts. And so we've been running normal business operations on all of our government contracts, making progress, working on our lunar landers, working on our satellites, working on our ground systems. But the new awards, you know, the pipeline of new awards, there's another clips or commercial lunar payload service award pending. That's called CT4. We're waiting for that, and that's affected by the government shutdown. The LTVS, the Lunar

Trained Vehicle Services Contract, it's waiting for the government shutdown, and that's caused some confusion because, you know, you can't obligate funds to new contracts without a continuing resolution. So we're waiting for those awards, and everyone in the market is anticipating when the government's going to open, and when the floodgates of new awards are going to go out into the industry. And so that's the biggest impact we see. And we did just get a new nominee to run NASA, Jared Isaacman, who had been nominated earlier and then had his nomination pulled. He's now back in the mix. But you could say arguably we have had a NASA that has not had a full-fledged, fully confirmed leader for the better part of a year. Has that affected space exploration policy? And if so,

what does that meant in terms of navigating that at intuitive machines? Well, it certainly has affected how the agencies needs to move forward. You know, we're in a geopolitical space race with China, and it's important that we're making progress towards putting humans on the moon. And the biggest change is in the Artemis program and how we can continue momentum to get humans to the moon. You know, what's been good for intuitive machines is the Clips program, the precursor missions to humans on the moon. We've been continuing.

And so we've been making progress, even though there hasn't been a full-time administrator in the agency. But those budgets need to be reconciled. You know, those programs need to be ironed out. You'll see, you know, what are we going to do as an agency with the hardware that has been built, the SLS, space, launch system, the Orion space capsule. When are those missions going to fly? What is the re-architecting of the human lunar program look like? Those are the big questions that I'm hoping the new administrator, Jared Isaacman, can roll up his sleeves and get his arms around. They're tough issues that need to be negotiated with Congress also. And so I'm happy to see that we're going to get a leader

and move those things forward. And Intuitive Machines is here to help in any way we can. But the programs that we currently have were working on in earnest. So it's just good to see, you know, that the performing orgs get a leader and can start executing on the contracts and the reformulation of Artemis. All right. Steve Ultimus of Intuitive Machines. It's always great to speak with you.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Morgan. Thanks for having me today. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.