Intuitive Machines CEO Stephen Altemus stares wondrously at the two-ton contraption holding court in a cavernous, environment-controlled room at his company’s new digs at the Houston Spaceport. A tangle of wiring and electronics wrapped in silver and gold insulation crawls like ivy around the 13-x-5-foot hexagonal cylinder perched on six landing legs. Behind it, an oversize American flag hugs the wall in dramatic flair.
This is the Nova-C IM-1 lander, now awaiting a launch window beginning February 14 at 12:57 a.m. (ET) atop a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket to commence a 21-day mission. (The launch will stream live on NASA TV and the IM-1 landing page.) After separating from the rocket a half-hour after lift-off, Nova-C will spend the week traveling up to 25,000 mph toward a 24-hour lunar orbit before slowly descending to the Malapert Crater rim near the moon’s south pole on February 22. If it lands successfully, it will become both the first private soft-landing and the first American spacecraft, since the Apollo program, to touch down on the moon.
But on this rainy October morning, a few days before shipping the Nova-C to Kennedy Space Center, Altemus is more excited by his team’s accomplishment than the mission’s potential historic significance. The black sheep in a family of painters, Altemus gestures toward the craft and beams, saying, “You can’t look at that lander and not see art. That’s the art of engineering.”
IM-1 will ferry 220 pounds of 11 NASA demonstration technologies and commercial payloads involving university aerospace students, the artist Jeff Koons, and Columbia Sportswear, among others. Two larger IM landers are slated for launches over the next year—all born from a NASA program to keep mission costs down by enlisting private industry to return to the moon.
“NASA taught us, working in human space flight, that it was okay to think big and build architectures that would move humans off the planet,” says Altemus, a 25-year veteran of the space agency. There, he worked with Intuitive Machines (IM) cofounder and CTO Tim Crain on Project Morpheus, developing a prototype lander capable of autonomous flight and fueled by an emerging liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellant dubbed, methalox.
“So, when we had the opportunity to take on a challenge to land softly on the moon for the first time in 50 years, commercially, we said, ‘Let’s do it!’” he adds. “Everything goes on the line right here. I mean, the world’s watching, the press is here, and we’re standing confidently that we’re going to be successful.”
The pivot to space
The lander is even more extraordinary considering that, despite its NASA roots, IM initially planned to operate on the periphery of the space industry instead of in the thick of it. Back in 2013, when Altemus, Crain, and Axiom Space cofounder Kam Ghaffarian formed the company, their focus was decidedly more Earthbound. They amassed a core group of NASA staffers, space contractors, and civil servants to leverage human spaceflight engineering methods to solve healthcare, energy, and aerospace problems. Despite early success in the form of two dozen inventions and four new business ventures, “it wasn’t part of our DNA,” says Altemus. So when NASA proposed its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program in 2018, inviting private industry bids for lunar delivery systems, “we knew that we needed to pivot.”
Things moved quickly. Later that year, NASA named IM one of 9 commercial vendors (now 14) allowed to bid on lunar payload carriers. The company then invested $5 million in equipment to map out a proposal for a methalox-fueled carbon fiber and titanium lander. And in 2019, NASA offered it $77 million for the vehicle and partial payload space, with IM free to lease the remainder to outside vendors. (NASA subsequently paid IM another $25 million to adapt the craft for a lunar south pole landing.) “At that point, I divested everything else and said, ‘We are now a business that is solely focused on installing the communications and infrastructure for a sustained human presence in and around the moon,’” says Altemus.
Despite its formidable experience, staff exuberance more aligns with a group of young engineers building a passion project. IM employees etched their names into the landing pads to stamp their place on the moon. A whiteboard adorned with space cartoons and the hashtag “#StickTheLanding” has popped up in the hall. Cutouts of Star Wars characters grace ceiling beams while a “Rocket Engine Petting Zoo” sign hangs above the viewing window for propellant tests. These last two flourishes are courtesy of Jack Fischer, a retired astronaut who serves as VP of production operations. Fischer spent some six months aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2017 and touts his IM contributions as “being on the ISS and just living the physics.”
“It’s just an incredible group of people with a great attitude who want to change the world,” he says. “It sounds corny, but it’s, ‘How can we do things differently to open the heavens for good by changing the economics and making it affordable?’”
Freedom to innovate
NASA’s fixed-price contracting structure imposed less financial and managerial bureaucracy than if the space agency built it, allowing IM engineers to streamline efforts and push the boundaries of innovation so long as they justified their decisions and had conventional backup plans. They opted for a methalox propulsion system favored by next-generation spacecraft companies and building their own deep space communications network.
Methalox is cheaper to produce; denser than hydrogen, requiring smaller fuel tanks and reducing mass; and cleaner than hydrazine, releasing carbon dioxide, water vapor, and some nitrogen oxide. It also has implications for human excursions to Mars, which has its own methalox ingredients. “If I can get oxygen and methane from the place where I’m going, I can fill up tanks without ever having to bring my fuel with me,” says Trent Martin, VP of lunar access and Nova-C program manager.
But such engines require more complex engineering, in part because the fuel needs cryogenic temperatures to remain liquid. (Only just last year did the first methane-fueled rocket, from Beijing-based LandSpace, make it into orbit.) IM’s biggest challenge was designing a computerized fuel injection system that could weather a temperature jump from the minus-280-degree Fahrenheit tanks to the 4,900-degree Fahrenheit flame across two millimeters—one that prevented both ice clogging the nozzle and combustion melting it. Advancing their Morpheus work, IM engineers devised a three-valve system that continuously adjusted streams from oxygen and methane propellants and nozzle-coating methane coolant that prevented melting. “A lot of our testing has been to get that injection pattern just right—the shape of the metal and how we made the holes in the coolant injection,” says Crain, the CTO.
“This engine technology gives us a high thrust so we can get to the moon quickly, in four to six days depending on the trajectory we’re taking,” adds Martin, a former NASA structural engineer. The route’s other advantage is preserving onboard electronics by crossing the Van Allen Radiation Belts once. “So we went with a technology that was potentially a little riskier than a traditional off-the-shelf technology because it hadn’t been tried before [in deep space]. But from our perspective, it’s the future.”
Talking in space
IM’s other main innovation involved circumventing NASA’s overtaxed Deep Space Network (DSN)—which talks to remote spacecraft by creating its own line-of-site lunar-distance communications system. The Lunar Data Network (LTV) consists of Nova Control, a circular command center facilitating easier task coordination, and a global array of ground stations by leasing time with nine large radio astronomy dishes at universities and institutions. Its resulting bandwidth speeds approximate the DSN’s at a glacial 4 Mbps.
The LTV is the first such commercial venture, with Nova Control engaging the first Houston-directed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972. After rocket separation, the Nova-C will autonomously stabilize and orient itself using thrusters and star-tracker measurements, before turning on its radios to contact Nova Control. Flight controllers will help guide Nova-C’s three trajectory course maneuvers toward lunar orbit where it will take and transmit mapping imagery before an automated descent to a gentle landing at 2 mph. From there, IM and its customers will operate payloads for two weeks before the lander permanently shuts down. Future missions will see IM adding a constellation of data-relay satellites around the moon for the first GPS-like lunar positioning and navigation system.
Payloads for everyone
Nova-C is hosting five NASA demonstration payloads that lay the foundations for a sustainable lunar presence and commercial economy. They are outfitted with stereo cameras, doppler LIDAR, a laser retroreflector array, and a radio receiver system and beacon designed to measure spacecraft positioning and timing, lunar mapping and ionosphere, and descent velocity and data that includes analyzing dust plume scatter.
Additionally, some tech expands the scope of lunar study past its geology to its environment, which ultimately impacts infrastructure. “When people think about science at the moon, they tend to think of studying the moon itself,” says chief scientist Ben Bussey. For example, a payload studying electrostatic charges exemplifies “science being done at the moon, but it’s not necessarily totally focused on the lunar science.”
But a sustainable lunar economy can’t happen without participation from all walks of life. So, while the primary goal focuses on testing technologies for future infrastructure, IM is using commercial payloads to create space industry opportunities and awareness. Some of those include an International Lunar Observatory precursor that will take the first images of the Milky Way Galaxy Center from the lunar surface; lunar digital data storage testing for disaster recovery; a digitized time capsule of art, music, and writing for future generations; and Jeff Koons artwork housing 125 spheres depicting different lunar phases associated with historical figures in a transparent cube. Back on Earth, collectors can purchase corresponding 15-inch mirrored stainless-steel sculptures and NFT images of moon work in situ. “We want to open up space exploration for people who don’t normally get to think about it,” says Altemus.
For one payload, Altemus challenged students from his alma mater, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, to build a camera that deploys from the descending lander to snap “out-of-this-world” selfies. Meanwhile, IM and Columbia formed a scholarship for female aerospace students there, while IM also created internships for nearby San Jacinto Community College undergrads to help build the lander. “A lot of them thought they would never be able to work in aerospace,” says Altemus. “And now they’re building a lander to go to the moon.”
IM’s primary commercial partnership with Columbia Sportswear exemplifies how seemingly unrelated businesses can both assist and benefit from the space industry. Columbia wanted to gauge how its Omni-Heat Infinity insulation—the lightweight, breathable, thermal-reflective foil it perfected with IM input and uses in its winter jackets—buffers the extreme radiation and minus-208 degrees Fahrenheit to 250 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures of space. The material coats a panel shielding the colder cryogenic propellant tanks by reflecting solar rays to minimize heat penetration.
“The material on that panel on the lander is exactly the same in our jackets and other winter wear,” says Haskell Beckham, an MIT-trained polymer chemist who serves as Columbia’s VP of innovation. “We’ve tested it in the lab and harsh conditions on Earth, but nothing quite as harsh as space.”
Their relationship has also brought co-promotional opportunities. Last September, an IM logo and moon graced the hood of Columbia’s NASCAR speedster at Tennessee’s Bristol Motor Speedway, while Columbia’s logo features prominently on the lander. The association exposes more people to space exploration, raises IM’s consumer profile, and brings Columbia some cool space cred. “Because of the work we’ve done with Intuitive Machines, we have signed up for a second launch and are having discussions with other space companies to test things in environments we obviously cannot do here on Earth,” adds Beckham.
Envisioning the lunar market
Over time, IM—which went public a year ago and now boasts some 260 employees—has been mapping out current and potential revenue streams, from leasing payload rides and network bandwidth to satellite development and servicing, selling images and data for more detailed lunar mapping, and developing lunar-based power and prospecting infrastructure.
“We are looking at different ways to make revenue in a market that currently doesn’t exist,” says Crain. “There’s a lot of talk of development on the moon that’s more than just landing and taking science measurements: `How do I build a landing pad? How do I build a road or underground habitat to protect from radiation? How do I refine water, and hydrogen and oxygen, out of the lunar surface?’ Those are as much civil engineering topics as they are science topics. So, 20 years from now, if there’s a robust commercial ecosystem, what do we do now to help that to occur?”
The more immediate future will see IM’s next two landers focus on scouting, drilling, and analyzing ice and soil composition. Some of the technologies will involve a mini lander that hops a half-mile from the mothership to scout for water and ice, a small swarm of connected autonomous rovers, and testing Nokia 4G lunar-surface communications.
Over time, increasing lunar trips will likely revamp the science conducted and position more startups as mission leaders. “We see an opportunity to get into the business of doing these services, whereas a lot of the larger aerospace companies see it as more of a cost risk,” says Peter McGrath, VP of business development. “When they see more risk than value and we see more value than risk, then roles swap. And we end up being the prime contractor to the government, and the larger aerospace industry tends to be a subcontract to us to control their risk.”
But on this trip, talk of markets, profit margins, and emerging science is tempered by a poetic undercurrent that taps into humanity’s primal attachment to the moon. “People don’t have that emotional bond with the space station,” says Fischer. “The moon is almost spiritual. Everyone who’s ever been on this planet has looked up to the moon. There’s just a bond there. And to be a part of something where we can make that accessible and connect to people in a way that you just can’t do in lower Earth orbit is special.”
