(Reuters) – Shares of Intuitive Machines shot up 43% in premarket trading after the space exploration company became the first private firm to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon.
The Texas-based company landed at the Malapert A crater, about 300 kilometers from the South Pole on Thursday, the first U.S. touchdown on the lunar surface in more than half a century.
The lunar lander dubbed “Odysseus” was sent on its way to the moon last Thursday using a Falcon 9 rocket launched by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The stock was trading at $11.81 before the opening bell. With the jump in its share price, the company’s market capitalization is set to cross $1 billion. It went public a year ago.
With 17.9 million shares as free float, less than 20% of the company’s outstanding stock is available to trade, making it susceptible to outsized moves.
“The technical acumen demonstrated today puts Intuitive Machines into a very exclusive club of space technology companies and government services contractors that can be relied upon to carry out the most demanding missions for NASA, DoD and other agencies,” Canaccord Genuity analyst Austin Moeller said.
The brokerage more than doubled its price target for the stock to $14, citing the probability of the company winning high-revenue growth contracts.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)
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