Intuitive machines made history last year when its Odysseus spacecraft became the first

commercial lander to successfully touch down softly on the moon. Now, the company is preparing

to do it again. And this mission is even more ambitious. It's an aggregate of a number of payloads,

but the one eclipse payload and the bulk of them are commercial payloads. And so this really is the beginning of, you know, the commercial economy on the moon. And I would call them all a flavor of the ice hunting kinds of payloads.

And so we're really starting to think about prospecting on the moon.

Steve Altimus, the CEO of Intuitive Machines, says the five-day launch window opens February 26th,

and the plan is to land the Athena spacecraft on the moon on March 6th.

Athena is carrying a collection of payloads, including a NASA-supplied drill and a hopper that

will venture into a permanently shadowed crater as part of the agency's clips program.

The company is also transporting, among other things, two rovers and a commercial spacecraft

that will, before the landing, deploy to attempt to make a flyby of an asteroid.

For intuitive machines, this is just one piece of a growing portfolio of transportation,

data services, and infrastructure, centered around the moon and eventually beyond.

When we think about what we're doing here to lay in the infrastructure around the moon for potentially a thriving commercial lunar economy,

why not take those models for contracting and building out that infrastructure all the way out in the solar system to around March?

You know, there's a number of satellites, imagers, space weather, satellites,

communications satellites around Mars that are aging infrastructure.

And so the commercial sector is now capable of flying complex missions in space

and deploying satellites and imagers and equipment in and around Mars.

And I think that's a natural extension moving forward.

And we've already been seeding discussions like that for a couple of years now in terms of

how to replace the aging infrastructure at Mars.

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