How Wall Street reads IM-1 moon-fueled rally

Much like Intuitive Machines’ spacecraft, its stock has been flying to the moon the past week.

In a little over a month since hitting all-time lows, and as its IM-1 mission made its way to the lunar surface, shares of Intuitive Machines have more than tripled since early January. It’s a rally that Wall Street analysts describe as fueled by retail investors’ excitement for the space company’s progress toward an unprecedented goal.

The Texas-based lunar company’s stock, with the apt ticker of “LUNR,” now trades for about $8 per share as of Thursday’s close, a far cry from January lows of closer to $2. At one point this week, as IM-1 progressed through milestones ahead of its landing attempt — the stock reached over $13 in trading.

In the moments after the lander, named “Odysseus” after the figure in Greek mythology, successfully touched down on the moon’s surface, the stock surged once again.

“We’ve never witnessed a publicly traded company go through [a moon landing attempt]. So this is new, not just for investors, but for us analysts as well,” Cantor Fitzgerald’s Andres Sheppard told CNBC.

Sheppard compared Intuitive Machine’s landing to a biotech company waiting on a FDA approval for a new drug: “It’s a bit of a binary outcome,” Sheppard said.

While Sheppard expected Intuitive’s stock price to climb after a successful landing, potentially as high as $15 a share, he cautioned “that valuation is certainly ahead of the company’s financials” — as “people are getting caught up” in the excitement and history of IM-1 landing on the moon, he said.

Intuitive went public via a SPAC merger less than a year ago, and has spent most of that time trading below its debut pricing. Only a handful of Wall Street analysts cover the $1 billion space…