Soar To The Moon With Small-Cap Stock Intuitive Machines

Yolowire 5-Dec-2024 10:49 AM

Investors would be hard pressed to find a stock that has performed better this year than %SpaceExploration company Intuitive Machines (NASDAQ:LUNR).

Shares of the small-cap stock are up an astounding 443% in 2024. For comparison, that’s more than double the 201% year-to-date gain in mega-cap high-flier %Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA).

Yet for all its success, Intuitive Machines remains a small-cap stock with a current market capitalization of $1.80 billion U.S.

The catalyst for Intuitive Machines meteoric rise has been news that the company has landed a contract with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, aka NASA.

Houston, Texas-based Intuitive Machines has announced that NASA awarded it a $117 million U.S. contract to deliver six science and technology payloads to the Moon.

The contract is part of NASA’s ongoing efforts to contract out work to private companies such as

Intuitive Machines.

NASA uses privately held SpaceX, run by Elon Musk, to shuttle astronauts to-and-from the International Space Station (ISS).

Intuitive Machines successfully completed a mission to the Moon on behalf of NASA in February of this year, marking the first time the space agency had landed a spacecraft on the lunar surface in more than 50 years.

Owing primarily to its NASA contract and relationship, Intuitive Machines is expected to generate sales of as much as $371 million U.S. in the coming year (2025).

The NASA contract and influx of revenue has gotten investors excited about Intuitive Machines, bidding its stock up as a result.

Intuitive Machines is a relatively new publicly traded company having gone public in February 2023 via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

Currently trading at $12.82 U.S. a share, Intuitive Machines’ stock is down 25% from its 52-week high of $17.14 U.S.

Some analysts say the pullback presents a buy-the-dip opportunity for this fast-growing space stock.