Talk Around Town: London Startup Instinct Space Claims It Can Halve the Cost of Reaching the Moon

What Folks Are Sayin' Down at the Feed Store

Well, shoot — word has trickled out of London that a four-person outfit called Instinct Space has stood up on the tailgate and announced a whole new direction, like a hunting dog that started out pointing quail and decided mid-field it'd rather tree a coon on the Moon instead. According to Payload Space, which sat down for a chat with CEO Alex Piñel Neparidze, the company says it is pivoting away from building a lunar-orbiting GPS constellation and toward constructing small, rideshare-compatible lunar landers meant to haul cargo to the Moon on the cheap.

The company claims the lander is designed to catch a rideshare rocket up to Low Earth Orbit — the same way a farmhand might hitch a ride into town on somebody else's pickup — and then power its own way to the lunar surface from there, no refueling stop required. Instinct says the vehicle would carry 20 kg of payload and weigh roughly 650 kg fully fueled, according to Payload Space's interview with the CEO. Whether any of that holds water outside the company's own press materials is, as we'll get to, a considerably murkier pond.

What We Actually Know for Certain-Sure

Here's the dry ground you can park a tractor on: Instinct Space is a real company, founded in 2024 by Joaquim Dickson, Ashwin Iyer, and Alex Piñel Neparidze, and it has four employees working out of London, according to its Y Combinator profile. The company joined Y Combinator in 2025, and it has raised approximately $1.2 million, which it says it is putting toward testing propulsion and navigation systems, per Payload Space's reporting.

The company did previously describe itself as working on lunar navigation infrastructure — a GPS-style constellation orbiting the Moon — before announcing this pivot to landers, according to Payload Space. That part of the story at least has two data points lining up: the YC profile and the Payload interview both note the earlier focus. CEO Piñel Neparidze told Payload that securing a launch was costly and difficult, and that the company saw potential customers stuck on Earth for the same reason — that framing is the stated rationale for the strategic turn.

In May 2025, Instinct signed an agreement with Polimak Space, a Luxembourg-based startup working on lunar in-situ resource utilization technology, to explore flying a regolith-handling payload on a future Instinct mission, according to Payload Space. That agreement is described as exploratory, and it is worth noting that Polimak Space is itself an early-stage startup — so this is roughly two tadpoles shaking hands about swimming to the ocean together.

The Tall Tales We Can't Verify at the Moment

Now here's where the mud gets deep, y'all. Instinct claims the lander will deliver payload to the Moon for approximately $550,000 per kg and says that figure is less than half the cost charged by current providers — but no independent pricing comparison or cost breakdown has been confirmed by anyone outside the company, according to the available sourcing. Established providers such as Intuitive Machines have operated under NASA contracts worth roughly $117 million per mission for substantially larger payload masses, which makes a tidy apples-to-apples comparison about as easy as comparing a catfish to a combine harvester.

The single-stage, no-refueling trip from LEO to the lunar surface is the architectural claim that ought to make an aerospace engineer squint real hard. Instinct says the vehicle will use an electric pump-fed engine burning hydrogen peroxide and kerosene, generating 6 km/s of delta-v — enough, the company claims, to cover that whole route. That is a technically ambitious mass-fraction problem, and not one independent engineer or third party has publicly stepped forward to validate whether those numbers pencil out at the stated cost. The company's first lunar mission is targeted for late 2028, the company says.

All of the technical and commercial claims reviewed here trace back to Instinct's own assertions, either relayed through the Payload Space interview with the CEO or hosted on the company's Y Combinator profile page. That's about as many independent verification layers as a single strand of barbed wire — it'll hold a slow cow, but don't bet the farm on it.

Analysis: Promising Concept, Real Thin Evidence Pile

Analysis, not reporting: The rideshare-to-LEO model for lunar delivery is a genuinely interesting architectural idea. If a lander is small enough to fly as secondary payload on an already-manifested rocket, the launch cost piece of the equation gets a lot friendlier, like splitting the gas money on a long road trip. The commercial logic of targeting the many small payloads stuck on Earth for lack of affordable lunar transport is coherent as a market thesis.

That said, analysis suggests the gap between a coherent pitch and a functioning lander is roughly the same size as the gap between drawing a duck on a napkin and fielding a duck that can actually honk. Instinct has $1.2 million, four people, no flights, and a 2028 target date. The propulsion and navigation systems are still in testing, by the company's own account. The one disclosed customer relationship is with another early-stage startup, and the agreement is exploratory. For a sector where even well-funded, experienced teams with NASA backing have faced serious delays and failures on first lunar landing attempts, the runway ahead for Instinct is long and the headwinds are considerable.

Also worth flagging as analysis: the cost comparison claim — less than half of current providers — is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the company's narrative, and without a detailed, independently audited cost model, that figure is marketing language rather than established benchmark. Readers should treat Instinct's framing of its own platform, cost structure, and competitive position as the company's self-description rather than industry consensus.