Intuitive Machines CEO: ‘We now have the platform for a lunar economy’

Steve Altemus is optimistic. And as CEO of Intuitive Machines, which made history with the first ever successful moon landing performed by a private company, he has good reason. But that was just the opening act of his company’s plans to build “a full stack: all the pieces you need to create missions to the moon, on the moon, and around the moon.”

Altemus explained in an interview with TechCrunch that Intuitive Machines is uniquely positioned to support lunar missions and eventually a lunar economy, not just as a contractor for NASA or the Pentagon but as a full-fledged commercial space services company.

Intuitive Machines was recently made the sole awardee for the multi-billion-dollar cislunar communications services contract, meaning it’ll be the one to provide high-bandwidth comms for Artemis and any other mission going out that way.

“This is massive,” Altemus said. “Now we have the third leg of the stool to hold up the company.”

“We had the CLPS [commercial lunar payload services] contract, which was the delivery service; then we have the LTV [lunar terrain vehicle] contract, which is infrastructure as a service. The middle piece is really data transfer and analytics, with this commercial lunar data for Artemis — if you think about it, we now have the platform for a lunar economy,” he continued. “And we’re able to do it as a commercial supplier for those services.”

The alternative has historically been “exquisite” systems, tremendously expensive one-off missions like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Technically astonishing — but with nine-figure price tags. Increasingly, government clients, civilians, and military have opted for more economical means of accomplishing the same thing; perhaps the best example is the use of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Dragon capsules to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS — this was once far more difficult and expensive a task.

Image Credits:SpaceX (opens in a new window)

Interestingly, Altemus credited a miscommunication with the present extent of its tech stack.

“When NASA first gave us the CLPS award, we had a misunderstanding. We thought they said, fly to the moon and give us data back, and you’re not permitted to use the Deep Space Network,” he said. Turns out they were allowed to use the DSN, but they worked under that constraint anyway. “We had to, from 2019, put in place a network to communicate from Earth to the moon to our lander and back. So by necessity we had to figure out that competency, we had to go into the communication and navigation areas, to get over the regulatory hurdles.”

The result is the company ended up with a far more robust solution than was strictly necessary, but that put it in pole position for the lunar communications contract — which indeed it won handily as sole provider.

Many might think that SpaceX, with its enormous Starlink satellite constellation, would be a natural fit to provide space communications services. But despite having superficial similarities (sending radio signals from space), these are very different problems being solved.

“When you think about lunar communications, it’s a fundamentally different physics question,” Altemus explained. “The environments need to be understood, the distances and situations need to be understood. We’ve operated in transit to the moon, in orbit around the moon, and on the surface of the moon, using a set of commercial ground stations, a dozen radio astronomy size dishes in different countries. And when you think about building a lunar lander, that’s a more complicated machine than a satellite that orbits the moon — so the talent is already inside the house.”

Though the lunar communications contract is the latest and most significant for Intuitive Machines, the Lunar Terrain Vehicle — a new Moon Buggy — is surely the easiest for ordinary people to appreciate. The company is working with AVL, Boeing, Michelin, and Northrop Grumman as a team, in competition with teams led by Lunar Outpost and Astrolab. The contract is not just to build a new lunar vehicle but operate and support it for 10 years; as Altemus pointed out, that makes it much more than a rover design job.

Image Credits:Intuitive Machines

“If you think about it, this is the first piece of commercial infrastructure on the surface of the moon that has to be operated autonomously. You can be enamored with the buggy, but you still gotta deliver the service,” he said. “As a company, IM is the only one in the pool that has the lander to deliver the LTV, the LTV itself as a vehicle, and the comms and navigation systems to operate it autonomously on the moon. The company is very well set up for it.”

Not that building a lunar rover isn’t exciting in itself, though, he hastened to add.

“All three companies are building an Earth-based mockup to do fit checks and evaluation with human astronauts: How conducive is your design to getting on an off, removing and replacing equipment, how it operates and drives,” Altemus said. “It’s funny — we just had astronauts doing the test, and two of them had actually walked on the moon. Hearing about the Moon Buggy, how they operated, what it was like and how the soil felt … I’ll tell you, it was fascinating.”

Intuitive Machines isn’t on its way to becoming a new prime; the traditional procurement methods of cost plus awards are giving way to fixed-price contracts with built-in long tails of services and support. “Can [primes] operate in that environment? The key to U.S. competitiveness is for us to move faster; it’s speed and agility that allow companies like IM to be successful, while traditional aerospace companies have found it difficult to adapt.”

With 400 people and growing, Intuitive Machines is still relatively small, but it is hiring fast. It’s based in Houston for a reason, Altemus said: “When I left NASA and walked out of the gates of Johnson Space Center, one of the key things I decided was that this was a fantastic place to build a company: right outside of the human spaceflight center. The talent pool in this area is incredible. We hire from all over the country, but it’s attractive here. They see the culture of the company and the energy — they can feel what it’s like to win.”