Spaceflight's lunar flyby mission will hitch a ride with Intuitive Machines' moon lander next year.

We now know which companies hitch a ride to the moon with Spaceflight Inc.

as part of a robotic lunar landing mission by Intuitive Machines in 2022.

While the Intuitive Machines Nova C-lander is en route to the moon during its mission, slated to launch in late 2022, a rideshare from Spaceflight Inc.

Orbit Fab previously received funding from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to test in-orbit refueling in space; the technology is still in its infancy and may prove useful to drive down the cost of lunar missions.

Orbit Fab's payload will be delivered into a lunar flyby pathway using Spaceflight's Sherpa-ES, an orbital transfer vehicle meant to place satellites in cislunar space (meaning, the area nearby the moon.) Spaceflight Inc.

The newly announced companies will piggy on to a moon landing mission funded through NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

In October 2020, NASA further announced it would award Intuitive Machines $47 million to place a water-measuring payload on the moon's south pole in 2022, called Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment (PRIME-1).

In August 2021, Intuitive announced it would launch its mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.