Intuitive Machines (LUNR 5.43%) stock started off the holiday-shortened week right, soaring more than 20% in early trading before quickly retreating to a 6.5% gain as of 10:10 a.m. ET.
The reason: As Intuitive announced this morning, NASA has awarded it additional contracts for Near Space Network (NSN) direct-to-Earth communications services.
If you recall, it was a NASA NSN contract that first lit the candle on this space stock back in September, driving up Intuitive shares 60% in a day after NASA hired it to build a communications system that could carry messages from Earth orbit to the moon and back. Valued at $4.8 billion over 10 years, this contract promised to turbocharge the $200 million or so the company currently receives for sending lunar landers to the moon.
Today's contracts hire Intuitive to provide additional "enhanced data transmission capabilities and autonomous operations" support for comms traffic between Earth geostationary orbit (GEO) satellites and spacecraft in cislunar (between Earth and moon) space; as well as support for communications to spacecraft in "highly elliptical orbits and deep space operations."
This sounds like great news for Intuitive Machines tock. And now here's the bad news.
In contrast to its September contract win, Intuitive Machines stated no dollar value for today's contracts -- and there seems to be a reason for this.
Today's contracts are described as "task orders," which while ambiguous appears to imply that they are components of the original $4.8 billion NSN contract, rather than additional money piled on top of that big contract. Admittedly, Intuitive also says the new contracts "complement the existing NSN contract" -- which implies the opposite. The periods of operation of the new task orders, however, are identical to those of the original contract, which tells me that most likely, these contracts won't put any additional money to Intuitive's bank account.
Even assuming I'm right though, let's not look gift space-horses in the mouth. Intuitive still has its $4.8 billion megacontract. That's still good news for the stock.
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