I would be very wary of any of the positive reviews on here. The negative ones are all representative of my experience at Moon Express and that of my coworkers on the engineering team.
The entire company feels like smoke and mirrors, particularly the last few years. Lots of money spent on making mockups and then calling them "prototypes". This is very misleading and never clarified in their media coverage. Very little real hardware has been built, with the exception of a bipropellant engine prototype. This is not a company that is on the verge of sending a spacecraft to the moon, as they would have you believe. It is clear they are out of money, likely in large part due to losing a lawsuit they initiated vs a vendor they wrote a bad contract with, then refused to pay (Moon Express v. Intuitive Machines). This resulted in Moon Express owing Intuitive Machines $4.1MM in stock/cash.
Pay is very bad. Often 40-50% less than market value (they claim they pay 20% less than market, this is demonstrably false). They lure people in with the promise of doing awesome stuff and then appeal to everyone that they must make sacrifices to achieve the goal of going to the moon and that stock makes up for that.
General lack of management/structure that any successful company tends to have. Too many executives relative to the size of the company. Very little (and frequently obfuscated) communication from executives to engineering staff. No performance reviews during multiple years at the company. Very little functional management (technical leads were forced to manage individual contributors begrudgingly).
Executive management would dictate aggressive schedules to engineering then not release funding to go purchase components/machine parts/etc, then be very concerned when deadlines were not met. It was ultimately revealed that this was due to funding, which is a valid reason, but be up front with engineering so that they aren't constantly being jerked up and down. When we did get approval to issue POs we would frequently delay payment to vendors for months past net 30 terms. Someone mentioned a roller coaster. This is very accurate.
Lack of "skin in the game" for many executives. One executive who basically oversaw all day to day operations of the company, including personally approving all purchases for much of the early days of the company lived in Canada full time and only came into the office for at most a week a month and more often than not on average probably a week every two months. He was very unresponsive via phone/email and it was clear that when he was visiting the office it was generally before/after he was on his way to vacation in the states. Many more executives who had titles and were presumably collecting salaries but were rarely if ever in the office.
CEO sells a good story to the media/investors but is generally perceived as very untrustworthy by employees. Many broken promises and general lack of respect for employees. Many of us suspect that C level management is not truly interested in going to the moon but mostly interested in living the lifestyle of executives running a company that is "going to the moon".
The biggest con is that somehow Moon Express continues to get positive media coverage and continues to be in a position where they may be able to con the American taxpayer out of money via NASA contracts by selling a story that consists of slick mockups and graphic design but no real technical substance.
