Instinct Is Building Lunar Landers That Hitch a Ride to the Moon

The Macro: The Moon Is Open for Business but Nobody Can Afford the Ride

Lunar exploration is having a moment, and it’s a messy one. NASA’s Artemis program has been pushing timelines to the right for years. The Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program has contracted multiple companies to deliver payloads to the lunar surface, and the results so far have been mixed. Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander launched in January 2024 and developed a propellant leak before it ever reached the Moon. Intuitive Machines landed Odysseus on the lunar surface in February 2024, which was a genuine milestone, but the lander tipped over on touchdown and had limited operational capability. Japan’s SLIM lander also touched down inverted.

The pattern is clear: getting to the Moon is still really hard. And expensive. A single CLPS delivery contract runs in the tens of millions of dollars. A dedicated launch vehicle adds another $50 to $100 million on top of that. For commercial customers who want to send instruments, experiments, or communication equipment to the lunar surface, the total cost and lead time make it impractical to iterate quickly. You don’t get to try again next quarter if something goes wrong.

Meanwhile, the LEO rideshare market has gotten remarkably cheap. SpaceX Transporter missions will take your satellite to low Earth orbit for around $5,000 per kilogram. Rocket Lab, Firefly, and others offer similar economics. There are dozens of rideshare launches per year. The infrastructure for getting hardware into LEO is mature, affordable, and frequent. The problem is that LEO and the Moon are very different destinations. Once you’re in LEO, you still need a way to get to lunar orbit and then descend to the surface. That second leg of the trip has been the expensive part.

The Micro: Three UK Space Engineers With a Rideshare Thesis

Instinct is building a small lunar lander designed to fly as a regular rideshare payload to LEO. The lander handles everything from that point: orbit raising, translunar injection, lunar orbit insertion, and descent to the surface. The minimum payload capacity is 20 kilograms to the lunar surface, with operational capability lasting an entire lunar day (roughly 14 Earth days).

The operations concept has three phases. Launch as a rideshare to any orbit, which means Instinct isn’t locked into specific launch vehicles or schedules. Cruise to the Moon from whatever orbit the rideshare drops them in, without staging or refueling. And then land. The “from any orbit” part is a meaningful technical claim. Most lunar mission architectures are designed around a specific launch trajectory. Building a lander that can adapt its flight plan based on its starting orbit adds complexity but dramatically increases launch flexibility.

The founding team is three engineers with UK space industry backgrounds. Alex Pinel Neparidze is Co-CEO with a Space Engineering degree from UCL and project management experience at Open Cosmos, where he worked on the PHISAT-2 and HAMMER satellites. Joaquim Dickson is CTO with physics from Imperial College and space technology from UCL. He worked on NASA’s IMAP magnetometer and ESA’s Solar Orbiter instrument suite. Ashwin Iyer is the other Co-CEO, combining mechanical engineering from QMUL with a Cambridge master’s in industrial systems and research experience with Rolls Royce on jet engines. They went through YC’s Winter 2025 batch.

The investor list tells you something about how seriously the space community is taking this: a16z, NVIDIA, Calm Fund, Maiora Capital, and Rebel Fund are all on the cap table alongside YC.

Beyond the lander itself, Instinct is developing a satellite constellation for lunar GPS. Navigation in cislunar space is currently ad hoc. There’s no GPS equivalent for the Moon. Every mission has to bring its own navigation solution. A positioning constellation around the Moon would be infrastructure that every future lunar mission could use, which is the kind of play that turns a lander company into a lunar services company.

The Verdict

I think the rideshare thesis is the smartest part of this. The entire commercial space industry learned over the past decade that reducing launch costs unlocks demand that nobody predicted. Instinct is applying that same logic to lunar access. If you can turn a Moon mission from a $100 million dedicated launch into a $5 million rideshare add-on (plus lander cost), you change who can afford to go. Universities, small nations, commercial science companies, even media companies could justify a lunar payload at that price point.

The technical risk is obvious and significant. Landing on the Moon is hard. Full stop. Companies with hundreds of employees and hundreds of millions in funding have failed at it in the past 18 months. Instinct is a small team attempting one of the most challenging engineering problems in aerospace. The track record of commercial lunar landing attempts should make anyone cautious about timelines and success probabilities.

But the team composition is encouraging. These aren’t software people pivoting to hardware. They’re aerospace engineers who’ve worked on flight-qualified instruments and real satellite missions. The PHISAT-2, Solar Orbiter, and IMAP programs are real missions with real hardware in space. That background doesn’t guarantee success, but it means they understand what it takes to build something that survives launch vibration, radiation, thermal cycling, and vacuum.

The lunar GPS constellation is the long game, and it could end up being more valuable than the lander business. If Instinct can establish positioning infrastructure around the Moon before anyone else, every subsequent lunar mission becomes a potential customer for navigation services. That’s recurring revenue in space, which is the holy grail for commercial aerospace companies.

In 30 days, I’d want to know where they are in the hardware development cycle. Have they built flight-qualified subsystems? At 60 days, the question is whether they’ve secured a rideshare slot and what the target launch window looks like. By 90 days, if they’ve completed a critical design review and have a credible path to a demonstration mission within 18 months, that puts them ahead of most lunar startups that stay in PowerPoint mode for years. The lander market will be won by whoever actually lands first and lands reliably. Everything else is presentation slides.