Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Lunar Lander Victory Lap with Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus 02/07/25

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

Intuitive Machines made history in 2024 with the first successful private lunar lander mission. Now, the company aims to do it again with its Athena spacecraft next month, carrying a collection of payloads. Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus joins Morgan Brennan to discuss the mission, the business model and the company’s long-term vision.

Intuitive Machines made history last year when its Odysseus spacecraft became the first commercial lander to successfully touch down softly on the moon. Now, the company is preparing to do it again. And this mission is even more ambitious. It's an aggregate of a number of payloads, but the one that clips payload and the bulk of them are commercial payloads. And so this really is the beginning of, you know, the commercial economy on the moon. And I would call them all a flavor of the ice hunting kinds of payloads. And so we're really starting to think about prospecting on the moon. Steve Altomus, the CEO of Intuitive Machines, says the five-day launch

window opens February 26th, and the plan is to land the Athena spacecraft on the moon on March 6th. Athena is carrying a collection of payloads, including a NASA-supplied drill and a hopper that will venture into a permanently shadowed crater as part of the agency's CLPS program. The company is also transporting, among other things, two rovers and a commercial spacecraft that will, before the landing, deploy to attempt to make a flyby of an asteroid. For Intuitive Machines, this is just one piece of a growing portfolio of transportation, data services, and infrastructure centered around the moon and eventually beyond. When we think about what we're doing here to lay in the infrastructure around the moon for potentially a thriving commercial lunar economy,

why not take those models for contracting and building out that infrastructure all the way out in the solar system to around Mars? There's a number of satellites, imagers, space weather satellites, communications satellites around Mars that are aging infrastructure. And so the commercial sector is now capable of flying complex missions in space and deploying satellites and imagers and equipment in and around Mars. And I think that's a natural extension moving forward. And we've already been seeding discussions like that for a couple of years now

in terms of how to replace the aging infrastructure at Mars. And so I think it feeds in nicely, living and working and learning about the moon and how to do that efficiently from a commercial sector, applying that out towards Mars makes a lot of sense. Intuitive Machines has also been public for two years this month, so investors are along for the ride. It isn't just Intuitive Machines heading to the moon either. Firefly Aerospace and iSpace both are poised to attempt landings in the coming weeks as well. On this episode, Steve Ultimis discusses the mission, the business model, and the long-term vision for intuitive machines. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space.

Steve, it's great to speak with you again. You're on the cusp of another big milestone mission. Walk me through it. Yes, good afternoon, Morgan. It's great to see you again and talk with you. Mission two, we're about ready to fly our second mission to the moon, commercial mission to the moon. We're down now.

Athena, our lander, is down at Kennedy Space Center, actually Cape Canaveral in the payload processing facility of SpaceX. Today, I believe we're going to load the Hopper, which is a Micronova. I'll talk about that a little bit with hydrazine fuel. All the software functional checkouts on the lander have been done. It's ready to go. I feel really excited about it. We're slated for a launch on February 26th, and our launch window extends into March 2nd. Any of those days puts us on the lunar surface on March 6th. So it's right around the corner, a few weeks away. The team is well-practiced.

We've been through our mission sequence test, which actually exercises the entire mission from start to finish in real time around the clock with our operators, with our flight software running and our ground operators operating the spacecraft through the flight to the moon, the orbit around the moon and the descent down to landing. And then this week we'll finish the surface operations test to check out all the payloads and make sure that they're ready to go in real time, like they're on the moon. Go ahead. Just so lots of good work behind us and still a bunch to go before launch. And there are quite a number of payloads. And some of them, like the hopper that you just mentioned that you've also built for NASA, are going to be coming to the surface of the moon with you,

and then some will actually be deployed before you actually attempt that soft landing as well. Just walk me through what is going to be making this journey on the spacecraft. This is a much more complex mission in terms of deployments, payload deployments off the lander. On the way to the moon, we'll fly atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. They call it the 5500. That's the size of the rocket. We'll separate from the booster at about 385,000 kilometer orbit by 185 kilometer orbit. That's a trans-lunar injection orbit. When we separate the lander, we have three payloads that are ride-sharing alongside the lander. One is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Lunar Trailblazer, which is a hyperspectral imaging satellite that will enter orbit around the moon and take pictures, hopefully,

to find evidence of water ice, particularly at the south pole of the moon. The second one is what we call an EPIC payload, which is a series, it's a deployer that deploys several small payloads in this highly elliptic orbit. And the third one is with a company called Astroforge, which is headed out towards an asteroid. So those deployments go on just after we separate, and then those payloads will separate and fly their particular missions. They are part of mission two, and Rideshare is part of that business. We'll then continue the journey and fire our engine beyond the translunar injection to get coincident with the moon and then enter lunar orbit insertion or lunar orbit. We'll orbit for two days or so

before we attempt a power descent down to the surface. Once we're down safely and softly on the surface, we have a NASA payload called the Prime 1 Drill Suite, which is essentially a drill and a mass spectrometer. So the drill will drill down into the surface in 10 centimeter increments. And as the drill augers down into the surface, the tailings from that auger drill will form a pile of lunar material that will be interrogated by a mass spectrometer. And we'll look for volatiles in the tailings pile that would give us evidence that there's water ice entrapped in the soils of the moon. And then the second payload we have is the hopper or micronova. That's an invention of intuitive machines. And it's an extreme mobility payload where we actually fly off the side of

the lander on a set of rails and it'll fly up into the, into the off the lander and hop along the surface five times. And eventually into a permanently shadowed crater, a region of the moon that has never seen sunlight. And on that hopper, we have two payloads. into a permanently shadowed crater, a region of the moon that has never seen sunlight. And on that hopper, we have two payloads. One is out of Hungary, and it is the Puli Space payload. It's a neutron spectrometer, and it'll look for constituents, what constituents are in the bottom of that crater.

It's like a mass spectrometer. The other one is a pyrometer out of Germany, and that one will measure the temperature in the bottom of that permanently shadowed crater. So very exciting to be the first inside a permanently shadowed region of the moon. Our other payload is a Nokia, formerly Bell Labs payload, where we're going to test out cellular signal, the 4G LTE, between the hopper and the lander and between a small rover that will deploy. That rover is in a rover deployment mechanism that lowers itself gently to the surface. The rover will drive out and will measure, you know, kind of like the self-commercial,

can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? As it gets further and further away from the lander. We have several other payloads. One's a Japanese rover, a very small fist-sized rover that drops from the lander, and it has two wheels, and it drags its tail, and it scurries around the surface. That's from Japan, a company called, uh, uh, uh, Yoyoki Diamond Rover. Um, and then we fly again, our partner and, uh, sponsor Columbia. Uh, we have a, the Omni heat shield, um, insulator. Uh, we're flying again as an insulating blanket on our lander.

And also, um, this sun shield that actually shields, um, uh, the lander from, uh, electronics from electronics from the rays of the sun. So very exciting set of payloads. It's an aggregate of a number of payloads, but the one that clips payload and the bulk of them are commercial payloads. And so this really is the beginning of, you know, the commercial economy on the moon. And I would call them all a flavor of the ice hunting kinds of payloads. And so we're really starting to think about prospecting on the moon. It's so fascinating to me. And I mean, just what you laid out speaks to how ambitious this mission is and how many different aspects there are to it. It's pretty incredible to think that a year ago this month, you were making history by landing

the first ever commercial lander on the moon. It was a soft landing. The lander did tip over on its side, which caused some debates, perhaps outside of the space community, more in the investor community, if you will, in terms of gauging the success of the mission. But I am curious what the lessons learned were from that mission and how it sets you up for a soft landing right-sized this time. Yeah, great question. We get that a lot. When we went through the mission, we learned quite a bit. It was clearly a learning experience to learn how to fly this spacecraft that we drew on a napkin and turned into reality. And so what could it do? What were its capabilities? What were performance limits

we learned about on the first mission? So all that learning went into a process we called a hot wash, which is a very critical, close scrutiny of the mission and what went well and what went wrong and what could we fix. And out of that, we identified 65 different items that we would want to improve, but we didn't need to do them all at once. So there are about 10 items that we said, let's go address these 10 for mission two, and then find a time to on-ramp the rest of the fixes that would build reliability and robustness over time. But the major things that we fixed were, if you recall, part of the whole reason that we landed a little harder than we would have liked and tipped over was because we did not have the laser altimeters or the laser range finders

engaged. There was a safety enable switch that could not be electrically cycled because the harness that we had did not supply power to that disable switch. So we couldn't fire the laser. That has been corrected. It was actually corrected immediately on mission two as soon as we found out, and so that was a big change that would have resulted in a different outcome. The other one that partially contributed to that harder touchdown than we would plan was the fact that our orbit determination that we were trying to figure where we were in space before we did our lunar orbit insertion, breaking burn, uh, that there was an error band around that, um, calculation, um, that was a little bit

askew to one side or another. And so we wanted to hone in and get a more precise location when we're at the moon before we conduct that breaking burn so that we're in a precise 100 kilometer by 100 kilometer circular orbit. We ended up in a more elliptical orbit and that wasn't necessarily desirable. And so we wanted to make sure we could process those orbit determination measurements better.

And so those were the two major things that I felt like we had to nail down for this mission. But we would have flown the same spacecraft again in a second mission if we had that same spacecraft. So it flew perfectly almost. And it was the operators that had to figure out, you know, how to do this a little bit better next time. The fact that you already have this track record that you're working off of, has it enabled you to go out and bring on more business? And of course, not just government business, but also private sector business? Yes, it's been a step change for us as a business in terms of successfully landing on the moon as a commercial company for the first time in history. Saying you're going to execute that and following through

and executing it retired a considerable amount of risk. We're now commercial companies and international partners, and even NASA have a confidence in intuitive machines that we're going to deliver on what we say we're going to execute. We've gone on to win a fourth mission. So now we have another flight from the CLPS office. So we have three remaining, the second, third, and fourth. We went ahead and established ourselves based on that ground network we put in place from mission one to win a communications contract with NASA called the Near Space Network Services Contract. And that, we won three elements of that. That's the ground network,

those big radio astronomy dishes around the world that we train on the moon and talk to our lander with. Those segments will provide that data in the future to NASA for their missions. And in addition, we won the data relay and navigation satellite constellation for NASA for that near space network. So we'll put in a constellation of five satellites that will communicate around the moon that'll give us 360 degree access to the moon anytime you want to fly or anybody wants to fly. And using those satellites in concert with each other, we can calculate position, navigation, and timing and create accuracy much like GPS on Earth, locating where your spacecraft or your lander is in the lunar orbit or on the surface. So quite a number of new opportunities for us to move forward and

grow the business. And really, when we show all these payloads, deploying off the lander and hunting for water ice and demonstrating that we have the technical prowess to do that as a nation really opens up the lunar economy for business. And that's been our goal from the beginning. And you and I have had multiple conversations over the last couple of years about the fact that the vision for this company is to not just be building lunar landers, but to be sort of on the forefront of building out the broader lunar economy. So how does winning contracts that bring you into GPS, lunar GPS, and communications speak to that broader vision. How quickly does that come online? What does that look like? Yeah, so what we set up was

this idea of three pillars of commercialization. So first, you have the delivery to the moon. So your ability to access the moon in a low-cost way, the transportation leg, if you will, all the way to, you know, out in a trans lunar injection into lunar orbit and down to the surface. And so that's the first pillar. And we've demonstrated that once. We have several more missions to go to continue to do that. And we'll evolve that into flying heavier and heavier cargo to the surface of the moon. So the second pillar is what I call the lunar data services. And that's really the space and ground networks, the data transmission and navigation from the moon, from the surface to the satellites to earth, and providing those data packets and all the imagery and science information to transmit that to and from the

moon. And then the third pillar is the infrastructure, the pieces that will be on the surface of the moon that actually we operate that infrastructure as a service. And the winning, the contract that we were awarded for that, that's evidence of, you know, that pillar coming to life is the NASA's Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services Contract, which is the large astronaut rover that operates half the year autonomously, operated commercially by Intuitive Machines, and then the other half would be operated by NASA with some astronaut flights. So that contract, we're in the design and development of the rover itself, which is about the size of an F-150 pickup truck. And we're in design of the Nova D heavy cargo lander that will deliver that LTV to the surface.

It was funny because we had this weekend in Houston, the auto show, and we took the lunar train vehicle to the auto show and it got rave reviews. It was a lot of fun. Were people able to drive it around? Well, no, we didn't let them drive it. I'm sure a lot of them did want to. It is fully electric and mobile. So it's a very interesting machine. When does that actually reach the service of the moon and start getting used by astronauts? Well, we'll see. We are in a competition still with two other companies. So we do the design of the delivery system and we do design of the LTV here in this year. And then probably in the May timeframe is when we culminate with our, what we call preliminary design review of both the heavy cargo lander and the LTV,

then there'll be a down select for a demonstration mission. And we'll fly a demonstration mission before the end of the decade, if we win that, to deliver that LTV to the surface. And we're really looking forward to that and demonstrating our ability to deliver heavy cargo and offload that heavy cargo, the LTV, onto the surface and then operate that autonomously, leveraging the data networks that we put in place already. So it all builds on each other. And this continuum of successes is really something that we're proud to highlight. What I think is so fascinating, and I feel like I've been talking about it for years, but it still almost can't be talked about enough, is how creative and innovative NASA has been in the past, call it decade plus, in terms of leaning into these public-private partnerships and thinking a little bit differently

about the way it's contracting with companies and basically helping to spur this commercial space industry. And so when you talk about all of these different awards and all of these different initiatives that are happening at Intuitive Machines, to me, it's sort of reflective of how this ecosystem has come along and how it will continue to come along. Yes, I think really the advent of the commercial lunar payload service contract eclipse contract was quite transformational in in terms of give empowering the commercial sector in the united states to innovate and develop systems at a lower price point than what were traditionally being developed under cost plus award fee type contracting mechanisms. So these public-private partnerships let us harness the

innovation of the U.S. economy and drive successes in smaller increments and in a regular cadence to build up real capability. And I think it's a fantastic competitive edge for the United States to ignite its economy and innovate so quickly. And so NASA really stepped out of their normal comfort zone to issue this public-private kind of contracting mechanism, fixed price with a long service tail. And they did it over and over again. And if we can learn to work and live successfully as a business in that environment, that's good for the nation. And that's good for our space program. And so I'm proud that NASA has started that and now is emphasizing the commercial sector's success going forward as NASA moves forward over the next administration.

So if we go back to this upcoming lunar lander mission that's going to happen over the next uh administration so if we go back to this upcoming uh lunar lander mission that's going to happen in the next couple of weeks then what is it how much does it cost to do a mission like this as a private company and what does that mix look like in terms of how you're making money on it both in terms of government with nasa and clips and with some of these other companies and countries that are also going to have payloads? Yeah, so the unit economics for a particular mission involve, you know, roughly you could charge about a million dollars a kilogram to take a payload to the surface of the moon and bring its data back to Earth.

And so say that's the market price when we take a ride share uh we also package that with our lander to to take it into a deep space kind of orbit uh this translunar injection orbit and you could charge on the order of you know 30 to 40 000 a kilogram and so if you have you know 130 kilograms of payload space available on the Nova C lander and about a thousand kilograms of payload on the payload adapter ring, and you could price those accordingly at a million dollars for the lander and 35,000 roughly for the ride shares, you know, you can make these missions profitable. And so looking at improving efficiencies, and we'll be working hard over the coming years to improve margins in the business

associated with those unit economics for delivery. Also, if you think about the data transmission, we're moving away from development over the next couple of years where we deploy the satellites to a more pay-by-the-minute kind of service model, which has much higher margins. And so looking forward to get that initial capability up and start that service, cellular or communication service back to Earth. Why is it so important to build out this lunar economy and have a lasting presence, especially, I guess, when you put it in a geopolitical or national security or even potentially supply chain lens? Yes, I think it's important to, you know, we've invested as a country

for decades in building out our access to space and servicing Earth from space and even landing on the moon. And so I think that high ground of the U.S. maintaining leadership in space is very important. And I think the things that you'll learn by working on the moon, building out autonomous systems, learning how to harness the resources that are on a celestial body is very important in our journey further out into the solar system. And so I think it's critical to set the norms and behaviors of how we live and work in space. And the moon is the next frontier with Mars and beyond on the horizon. And so, you know, you start at low Earth orbit and then you move out to geosynchronous orbit and then out to cislunar space.

And so I think staying there is much like any of the space markets that we've endeavored. We've stayed there. Once we've gotten there, we've stayed there and put it into our economies like you're seeing today with all of the imagery satellites of the earth that give us a better understanding of not only, you know, the weather, but actually, you know, how the earth is changing over time and how businesses can take advantage

of that space-based data. Geosynchronous orbit for communications, right? And so when you think about rare materials and rare minerals and geological differences of the moon might give us some resources for Earth and also how to work with those resources from space back to Earth. And so it is very important and it is a natural evolution for us. There is this growing sense that President Trump, and perhaps maybe because Elon Musk is in the infrastructure around the moon for potentially a thriving commercial lunar economy, why not take those models for contracting and building out that infrastructure all the way out in the solar system to around Mars? You know, there's a number of satellites, imagers, space weather satellites, communication satellites around Mars that are aging infrastructure. And so the commercial sector is now capable of flying complex missions in space and deploying satellites and imagers and equipment in and around Mars. And I think that's

a natural extension moving forward. And we've already been seeding discussions like that for a couple of years now in terms of how to replace the aging infrastructure at Mars. And so I think it feeds in nicely living and working and learning about the moon and how to do that efficiently from a commercial sector. Applying that out towards Mars makes a lot of sense. And, you know, it'll make what appeared to be in the past unachievable hurdles financially to bring those costs down, makes the Mars more accessible. And I think it's important for the American people to have a stretch goal to say, we're actually going to get to Mars. We're actually going to aim for it and actually strive to get there as a stretch goal. That's a good thing. It's super fascinating to me.

I'm sure there's a lot of folks out there that don't realize that there is aging infrastructure around Mars that needs to be addressed in of itself. It's really fascinating. So February seems to be a special month for Intuitive Machines. You have this upcoming launch. We talked about the history-making soft landing last February. And then the February before that in 2023 is when the company went public as well. So we're having this conversation and you are publicly traded, which I think is really interesting in of itself too. And certainly retail investors are very excited about what you're doing and the business prospects.

And I would imagine are going to be watching very closely, even from an investing standpoint with this upcoming mission. What has it been like to be navigating the public markets while navigating not only space, but some of the hardest feats we've seen in space, like landing on the moon? Yeah, I'll tell you something. It's been quite a learning experience. I guess wisdom comes out of learning experiences. And so you're right. February is an exciting month for us with major milestones. And it's been good. We went, like I said, through a D-SPAC transaction in 2023 and went public on the NASDAQ. And, you know, we spent from a business standpoint and a financial standpoint, we spent time in 2023 and 2024, you know, getting the company financially sophisticated so that we can come out of the overhangs that come with a D-SPAC transaction, you know, go through the, get the company's balance sheet strong, get the stock performance strong, executing on the missions to the moon, and really kind of

putting the whole package together so that, you know, we can win the business, we can execute on the business and are stable financially, really makes for, you know, just a pleasant, you know, kind of journey in the public markets. It also gives exposure to a whole different demographic of people, like you say, the retail investor who can now participate in space and space exploration and space utilization that would not have known about what Intuitive Machines was trying to do with the lunar economy. And so it's such a great platform to shine a light on the future and where space is going and where the lunar economy is going and to have people participate in that, whether it's just through investing or it's actually working for Intuitive Machines or working with us as a partner. And then just finally, are there any nuances or any aspects of the business that

you would want the investing community to know or better understand, given the fact that space is technical? And I even just think back to last February and sort of the debate that you did see on Wall Street about whether the mission had been successful or not, when clearly from a space industry standpoint, it had been. Yes, I think it's been well received in that, you know, as we go through as CEO, you know, I perform the earnings calls every quarter. And we've been able to talk about the lunar economy in a more consistent way as we've evolved from just a lander business or just a lunar program to land on the moon to a more fulsome spectrum of services that makes sense when all tied together into how you generate and create a lunar economy. And so that education process for us as a company,

and then to teach that to the world through the earnings calls and press releases and our progress has been an exciting journey. And I think what has been most compelling is that people are talking about it more in the news cycle of the present moment. And when we were thinking about coming out into public eye, people thought the moon and the lunar economy was such a stretch. It was years away. And we made it relevant in today's news cycle. And I like to say in 2018, when we started our focus and pivoted the company

towards the moon, there were no zero lunar landers being built in the United States. There's over a dozen lunar landers today. And when we fly to the moon on mission two, there will be three lunar landers in space at the same time. It's an incredible exponential leap to see how far and how fast we've come since 2018 in terms of exposing the lunar economy and building it out here. And we'll take it one step at a time. Do you speak to the other companies and the other CEOs, including the ones that will have lunar landers in place on the moon at the same time?

Oh, yes. I called Firefly CEO Jason Kim and wished him well for his mission. So we talk and good for them. We wish them all the best. And iSpace also, I talked to their CEO at the IAC conference in Milan and say, how do we share resources? How do we work together? And so it's a very collaborative and collegial set of relationships because, you know, to have a thriving lunar economy, it has to be more than one company trying to do that. It has to be a family of companies that are working together to build this ecosystem out. Steve Altomus, the CEO of Intuitive Machines. It's great to speak with you today. Thank you so much. Thanks for taking the time, Morgan. It's a pleasure talking to you.

That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.