NASA wants to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, but right now, astronauts have to be in direct line of sight with Earth to phone home. The space agency is looking to change that with its developing Near Space Network, and it’s willing to pay potentially huge sums to private companies to help make continuous lunar communications a reality. Those plans got a boost today when NASA announced it had awarded Intuitive Machines a contract to build and deploy a satellite constellation capable of pro ...