LOGAN, Utah — Smallsat launch services company SEOPS is partnering with Intuitive Machines to provide lunar rideshare opportunities.
The companies announced an agreement Aug. 5 whereby SEOPS will buy space on future Intuitive Machines lunar missions that it will then offer to customers who want to send smallsats to the moon or other destinations in cislunar space, including geostationary orbit. The agreement covers launches after Intuitive Machines’ IM-3 mission in 2025.
“We’ve seen a significant increase in interest from both our government and commercial customers in lunar missions,” Chad Brinkley, chief executive of SEOPS, said in a statement. “It makes financial sense to take advantage of the excess capacity on Intuitive Machines’ lunar missions, while also supporting our customers’ goals for lunar exploration.”
SEOPS currently offers rideshare services on missions to Earth orbit such as SpaceX’s Transporter line of dedicated rideshare missions. SEOPS flew seven satellites on the Transporter-10 mission in March and has five scheduled to launch later this month on Transporter-11.
For the lunar missions, SEOPS will also offer customers the option to use an orbital transfer vehicle it is developing to provide “last mile” delivery of their satellites after deployment.
“SEOPS entrusting us with the delivery of its customer’s payload to space highlights our capabilities to provide the essential infrastructure and services that support all groundbreaking commercial ambitions in space,” Steve Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said in a statement.
Intuitive Machines has offered rideshare opportunities on its own for the upcoming IM-2 and IM-3 missions. It is flying NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft, which will orbit the moon to search for water ice, on IM-2, along with the Brokkr-2 smallsat by asteroid mining startup AstroForge. The company plans to fly its own lunar communications satellites as rideshares on IM-3.
“We take satellites to a translunar injection orbit and drop them off,” said Trent Martin, senior vice president of space systems at Intuitive Machines, during a panel at the AIAA ASCEND conference Aug. 1, using excess capacity on the Falcon 9 rocket launching the company’s lunar lander.
“We found that to be quite an interesting market,” he said of those rideshare offerings. “We managed to full up both IM-2 and IM-3 with rideshare payloads,” but added there was a little bit of room left for rideshares on IM-3.
