Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines belong to a group of more than a dozen private companies vying to land lucrative NASA contracts sending small spacecraft to the Moon. But according to Trina Patterson, Firefly’s vice president of marketing and communications, the two have managed to remain friendly within the competitive space ecosystem.
“We’re very, very much ‘competimates,’” said Patterson while speaking at a SXSW panel on March 11 alongside Josh Marshall, communications director at Intuitive Machines, and Nilufar Ramji, a public affairs officer for NASA. “The lunar economy can’t be done by a monopoly. It really takes a village,” she added.
Both Firefly and Intuitive Machines are vendors for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, an initiative established by the space agency six years ago to launch a lunar economy propelled by a mix of startups and established companies bidding on NASA’s Moon contracts. The model offers NASA a more hands-off and low-cost approach to lunar missions, with the agency sending science and technology experiments aboard CLPS vendor-designed spacecraft.
The program hopes to jump-start lunar commerce by creating a lunar delivery service similar to how FedEx or DHL operate on Earth. In this case, NASA’s role is equivalent to that of a customer shipping a package, with the likes of Firefly and Intuitive Machines acting as delivery services that take said package “wherever it needs to be,” said Ramji.
CLPS was always intended to be a high-risk program. “We know going in there that these companies have never landed on the Moon,” said Ramji. Three out of the four missions completed under CLPS so far have failed. The only successful mission was by Firefly earlier this month when its Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down near a lunar volcanic feature known as the Mons Latreille. NASA paid Firefly more than $100 million to deliver a litany of experiments to the region. The lander, launched into orbit from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center in January, today (March 17) completed more than two weeks’ worth of surface operations for the agency.
Intuitive Machine received support from Firefly after failure
Shortly after Firefly’s successful landing, another lunar lander from Intuitive Machines also attempted to make contact with the Moon. But the spacecraft tipped over while landing and ran out of battery, cutting a planned ten-day mission short. Intuitive Machines, which received $62.5 million from NASA to carry payloads to the lunar surface, previously faced a similar fate in 2024 when its initial CLPS mission saw the company’s lander topple over shortly after touching down on the Moon.
The company says it received support from rivals like Firefly after its first failure. At the time, “I was still 50-50 on whether we’re supposed to hate you guys or love you,” said Intuitive Machine’s Marshall. But after receiving a kind card from its competitor, Marshall claims they landed on the latter option.
Nearly every space company can relate to the pain of a mission gone awry. Firefly, which also develops rockets, experienced a mid-air explosion of its Alpha rocket during a 2021 launch that resulted in pieces of the vehicle falling back down to the ground “like feathers,” according to Patterson. One of these pieces was later mailed to Astrobotic, another CLPS contractor, after a mission last year failed to reach the Moon due to a valve leak. Firefly’s message included a note reading, “We understand where you’ve been. Keep going forward,” according to Patterson.
He added that Firefly holds watch parties to celebrate launches from its rivals like Intuitive Machines. “Going to space is hard. Landing on the Moon is harder,” he said. “It’s extremely difficult, and you have to support each other.”
NASA’s CLPS vendors include 14 companies:
- Astrobotic, based in Pittsburgh, Pa.
- Ceres Robotics, based in Palo Alto, Calif.
- Draper, based in Cambridge, Mass.
- Intuitive Machines, based in Houston, Texas
- Masten Space Systems, based in Mojave, Calif.
- Orbit Beyond, based in Edison, N.J.
- SpaceX, based in Boca Chica, Texas
- Blue Origin, based in Kent, Wash.
- Deep Space Systems, based in Littleton, Colo.
- Firefly Aerospace, based in Cedar Park, Texas
- Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colo.
- Moon Express, based in Mountain View, Calif.
- Sierra Nevada Corporation, based in Reno, Nev.
- Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, based in Irvine, Calif.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
