Main Engine Cut Off - T+129: Steve Altemus and Dr. Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

Steve Altemus, President & CEO, and Dr. Tim Crain, VP of Research & Development, from Intuitive Machines join me to talk about their Nova-C lander, the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, and their task order from NASA for a landing on the Moon in July, 2021. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 41 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Rui, Julian, Lars, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous—and 253 other supporters. Intuitive Machines NASA Selects Intuitive Machines for Robotic Return to the Moon in 2021 | Intuitive Machines Commercial Lunar Payload Services | NASA NASA Selects First Commercial Moon Landing Services for Artemis | NASA NASA: Private Houston company working on moon landing | khou.com Back to the moon: Johnson Space Center to play key role in NASA’s mission to the moon, beyond | Community Impact Newspaper Project Morpheus : Home Project M (NASA) - Wikipedia Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Like the show? Support the show! Music by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and we've got a very special guest or pair of guests today. We have Steve Altimus, CEO and Dr. Tim Crane, VP of Research and Development of Intuitive Machines today to join us and talk about landing on the moon. Intuitive Machines is one of the first three companies contracted with NASA to deliver payloads to the lunar surface as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. So we're going to be talking a lot about moon landing today. We're going to be talking a lot about what Intuitive Machines is working on, even beyond landing on the moon, if that wasn't enough. But before we do that, let's thank everybody who made this show possible.

If you want to help support Main Engine Cut-Off, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. This is 100% listener supported. So if you like what you're hearing, if you like interviews like this, head over there to support the show. This episode of Main Engine Cut-Off is produced by 41 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Rui, Julian, Lars, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous

executive producers. Thank you all so much for supporting the show. And with that, let's get into one of the things that you're making possible. Let's give Intuitive Machines a call. Steve and Tim, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me. It's always a pleasure to talk to people doing real work rather than just talking about work like I tend to do up here. Thanks, Anthony.

It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, thanks for having us on, Anthony. So before we get into the details of everything that we're going to be talking about today, can I just have each of you say your name in your voice so people out there know which one is Steve and which one is Tim and it's not some guessing game the whole time? All right. Well, welcome, listeners. This is Steve Ultimus. And like I said, happy to be here on the show with my partner, Tim Crane. This is Tim Crane. Steve and I co-founded Intuit Machines with our partner, Cam Gaffarian, who's with us in spirit. Well, you've got a very exciting couple of months in the bag here. You've got an announcement just

back at the end of May, I believe it was, that you're going to be one of the first three companies contracted with NASA for the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program. And if I remember correctly from all the reading I was doing, you are about two years away from the scheduled launch. As of right now, is that kind of where things lie today? Yeah. I'll tell you a little bit about the Commercial Lunar Payload Service Program. We were awarded in May, May 31st, I believe it was, up in Washington, D.C., I think the Goddard Space Flight Center, actually up in Maryland, where we received the official notification from NASA that we were one of three companies to win the first task order to fly a NASA science mission to the moon.

So what we're asked to do was to provide an end-to-end service from launch through touchdown on the moon and then relay of all the scientific data from a number of experiments nasa experiments relay that data back to the ground and uh it's totally turnkey service provided to nasa by intuitive machines uh basically you know back in the november time frame nasa awarded nine companies the right to bid on missions that were that NASA forecast it was going to need going back to the moon and so of those nine competitors we were all able to bid on this first mission to the moon and so we were awarded initially November December that we were one of the nine nine

partner companies and then come May 31st we were notified that we were one of the nine partner companies. And then come May 31st, we were notified that we were one of three that were actually selected to go back to the moon. So we're going to get into a lot of the details of the Nova Sea lander. I'm curious, right off the top, what do you think it is about what you're offering that got you into that first group of three actually you know awarded a task order for a flight well i'll give you my two cents and then tim can in weigh in also uh but i would say is what nasa was looking for was a different way of doing business and was looking for some innovative approaches to essentially

finding companies that were willing to do a mission that was less than 100 million dollars to the moon including a launch vehicle and so there was a significant break point in some communities who use in some competitors who used. A more traditional thinking about how to develop a lunar program and others who took some risks and implemented. Some innovative approaches to schedule cost control and other technical solution. And out of those proposals that were all evaluated NASA. Generally pick. The three that could, with the highest probability, meet that goal of a sub $100 million mission to the moon for science payloads. And NASA

incurred some significant risk to allow us to try that. But that's what they were kind of looking for. You couldn't be too low, because then you were unrealistic. You had to identify all your risks, what your schedule was, what your technical solution was. But in the end, they said, well, this sounds reasonable. It might be achievable. And by taking a risk in this way, NASA is able to ferret out the most innovative solutions of all the competitors. And I think that's why we want. I think we also offered NASA a mix of kind of new space thinking, but with some traditional sensibilities, because we do have a lot of NASA civil servant and former contractor staff in the company. of our staff actually worked on on project morpheus where we were doing uh precision landing hazard avoidance advanced methane propulsion automated software development so a lot of the a lot of the bones of our offering came from an experience that we'd had before they were familiar

with but then as steve said we had some innovative ways to wrap it into a commercial product and i think that was a good mix so you you mentioned costs there up front. And of the three announcements so far, you have the title of the lowest cost lunar lander of this program at $77 million. The other two were at $79.5 and $97 million. Is there anything particularly that you could share that maybe even the mindset, not any industry trade secret kind of things, but what is it that allows you to get that cost so low for this type of mission? Well, one is, you know, you have to be competitive. I wish we would have asked for more. Yeah, exactly.

The threshold was. But we still can do it for what we advertise for. We still can do it for what we advertise for. It's having a mind that you have to solve the problem, essentially develop an $80 million mission to the moon. You know about half of that is launch cost, and the other half is to develop the lander. So when you go about it, you make decisions about every dollar, every nickel that you're spending, and say, here's what we're trying to get out of this particular test or this particular development and here's the way it's been done traditionally you know from our experience with nasa that we know how human spaceflight and

science missions and and nasa critical missions are done where might you take the risk so that you can still get a result, but you won't jeopardize the entire mission, right? And analyzing each trade study that way, you can find some innovative solutions that hadn't been done before. One easy example to point to is our mobile test stand, our engine test stand. We didn't have the money to be able to build a fixed infrastructure to begin engine testing so you know we did we went to downtown houston to the auction and bought a 24 foot flatbed truck and built a mobile test stand on the back of that truck and we saved saved, you know, $300,000 just doing that.

So it's constant vigilance as, you know, where's the money going? And is it going to make the biggest bang for the buck it can? It's not about shortcuts in those processes. It's about thinking differently. Another example might be, you know, the landing gear. The landing gear of the vehicle happened to look a lot like a bicycle frame. So where do we start? We start talking to the composite bicycle manufacturers who actually have the machines and the statistical database to say what their materials perform in those kind of configurations. configurations. And so that's a real solution for us where we don't have to use traditional aerospace suppliers to be able to build a sophisticated, high-strength, low-weight landing gear. So the program is full of these kinds of ingenious innovations that are going

to help us close the total cost of the mission. Yeah, the bike frame thing, that's pretty amazing. I have never heard that before, but those are the stories that you love. In space history, there's always these things that come up with that. Oh, did you know the person that made X also works on Y? And there's these weird little connections between hardware that you wouldn't consider space rated that makes a difference in the long run. So that's cool to hear that you're bringing that into a program like this. Because you hear about it back in the day in the Apollo run. So that's cool to hear that you're bringing that into a program like this, because you hear about it, you know, back in the day, and the Apollo missions where different companies were contracted to build things for space that hadn't before. But to hear it on a scale like this is something new to this time in the industry. And that's pretty awesome to hear.

Yeah, there's a there's an anecdote associated with that, Anthony, that goes all the way back to when we were all involved with the Morpheus project. And if you look at the Morpheus lander, you'll notice it's a four tank kind of lateral design. It's four tanks, very flat. And one of the big questions when we first started that project back in 2009, Steve? Yeah. 2009. One of the big questions was, well, what about slosh between the four tanks? You got a gimbaled engine and the vehicle's rocking around.

What's going to happen with slosh? And so we kind of started putting together a plan for a very high fidelity, aerospace quality, CFD analysis of fluid flow in the in the tanks and we get back into the office one week and one of our interns had gone to home depot over the weekend and had purchased some light globes and filled it with water and blue dye and put it on a frame and it agitated it to see what kind of dynamic response you got from a scale model of uh of the morpheus vehicle and it was that fresh approach to say look the the endpoint high fidelity aerospace solutions are definitely um important but what kind of things can you do

that are practical engineering to take advantage of technology's capabilities? And that kind of set the tone for a lot of the thought processes we've had in the last decade to think about, you know, how do you look at something that's a little bit different and get an innovative result? That's great. That's a much simpler solution than trying to find who was going to do that analysis for you. And it's like, no, I just taped a couple of things together and shook it around a bit to get an easy enough answer for us to lead us in the right direction. That's right. And then the flights proved it out. So we were very happy with the result.

So you mentioned Project Morpheus. That's something I'm particularly interested in. So you mentioned Project Morpheus. That's something I'm particularly interested in. There's a ton of heritage there from that project, but I'm curious what happened between... maybe you can give us a shortened history of Project Morpheus. We've mentioned it before on the show, but in case there are some people that haven't heard of it before, maybe a shortened history. And then I'm very curious what has happened between the end of that program and where you are today looking ahead to landing on the moon in two years? Well, I think the spirit of Project M and Project Morpheus and what we were trying to build and how we were going to move humans off the planet for exploration. And here I sat at the head of Johnson Space Center Engineering, which is essentially, you know, I would argue the NFL of engineering, very capable organization. of engineering, very capable organization. And, you know, we were kind of without any clear direction of where the agency had to go for exploration. We were kind of a Ferrari running at idle, you know, and it would be great if we could step on the gas and show the world where we were going to go as an organization.

So we kind of came up with this, put a walking robot on the moon in a thousand days as a very powerful descriptive language kind of project or program that would excite the American people in the world. Got a lot of resistance to that in the beginning, but then slowly it caught on because what it did was it gave us an entrepreneurial kind of sense of what you could do by thinking differently while you're still in the government. And we built in a very short order. It was a three-year project. It turned out to be a four-year project or so. But we did a three-year project where we're going to build a LOX liquid oxygen, liquid methane-propelled lunar terrestrial test bed and use advanced navigation sensors and precision landing and hazard avoidance software and show that you could actually get to the moon.

And in the process of doing that, also build a walking robot by the way ended up on international space station but we pushed that forward and even in the and with the resistance of nasa in begin in the beginning to work on a technology development project that was not aligned with the major programs at the time it was constellation program you know the orion and the sls and the altair lander what are you guys doing over here what is this pocket of piracy engineering that's going on and they started to watch and learn over months that we were actually flying uh we were operating differently we were flying tethered tests. We were then moving to free flight tests. And there was a lot of excitement in the team. And there was a lot of long hours and a lot of happy faces about people actually touching hardware and working. And so

there was something about the spirit of that project that NASA started to appreciate as we went out and talked about it. We then had a major accident and lost the vehicle during our first free flight test. And NASA stood behind us and said, boy, this idea that you fail, but you had a successful test, let's build it again and try again. And because of all that groundwork that we laid with the agency to explain that we were trying to do something new and fast and innovative, then we failed and rebuilt stronger. In like eight or nine, 10 months, we built another vehicle and tested and flew again. It was just incredible. And the whole agency responded in a positive way to say, this is what we want more of. And so out of that came Intuitive

Machines, that idea that we could take those ideas and those methodologies and put them in a company and then go back into the aerospace community and create some disruption in the model that's been perpetuated for decades. Let's try to be a little disruptive so that we can produce more spaceflight hardware and faster missions in one administration, say, instead of across, you know, several administrations. So since then, when we formed Intuitive Machines, we helped to finish out the free flight testing for the Morpheus program. finish out the free flight testing for the Morpheus program. And then they wrapped it up.

And unfortunately, well, they wrapped it up. They took the whole vehicle and the engine system and went to Plumbrook out in Ohio at the Glenn Research Center and tested the engine, the liquid oxygen engine at altitude in the Plumbrook thermal vacuum chamber. And we had a very successful test there. And then what they said was, okay, that's enough of that program. And unfortunately now the Morpheus lander hangs in the museum of Spaceport Houston. And it's there for everybody to look at, and it's no longer active. But if you look at that program and what came after,

But if you look at that program and what came after, that methane propulsion technology is now, it was advanced enough that we brought it into our company to push forward Nova C. And I can tell you, you won't find an official Morpheus alumni page anywhere on NASA, but a big chunk of the Ascent Abort 2 team came from the Morpheus heritage. A lot of the experience that people gained from that project before it ran its course have now dispersed with just an incredible perspective throughout the agency and are carrying that kind of heritage and spirit forward in other areas that maybe aren't quite as singular as a lunar lander, but are important for the agency nonetheless. Yeah, how do you think that impacts?

You know, there's a lot of people give NASA flack for the big headline projects that have problems and are big headlines, you know, in trade publications, but also in mainstream news and that kind of stuff. But these smaller projects that people within NASA work on move outside of NASA, maybe some other people stay internal and go to other places. How much do you think that had to play into something like commercial lunar payload services today? Is that something that you kind of draw a direct line between, or does it feel a little bit more separate than that? I think it's in the mix. Definitely the Google Lunar XPRIZE and the enthusiasm and the motivation that people in that community had, you know,

got NASA to thinking about how they might do things differently. And then Morpheus was a demonstration that we could move fast for an order of magnitude less schedule and funding than you might otherwise have thought. So I think you kind of had some enthusiasm and then a proof of concept that maybe that enthusiasm was well-founded. That kind of got into the psyche of the agency, I believe. Yeah, I think a couple examples for you. You know, there's a lot of these lesser-known projects within the agency that are all about the engineers cutting their teeth on real flight hardware developments. Marshall Space Flight Center's fast track engine went on to be SpaceX's Merlin engine. Yeah, absolutely. Right. So there was a lot of seeds that were planted by these

kinds of developments. Recall the X-38, the lifting body, reentry lifting body, a lot of those people from X-38 went on to be some of the leadership in the Orion spacecraft development, spearheaded by Lockheed, but the NASA people cut their teeth on X-38. particular with guidance navigation control they set up some structures like a mode team that mixes the civil servant expertise with the contractor expertise and blends the team to be a very high powered team in areas of the highest criticality they did that on the heat shield they did that on the guidance navigation control they did that on the parachutes and so a lot of the heritage of x3838 went into the Orion systems technologies. Let me put it that way. I won't comment on the program management and the overall cost and the schedule for Orion, but what makes Orion such a sound spacecraft are the engineers that worked on those critical systems

to get them to the maturity that they're at today. So you look at that and then you look at the science centers like the Goddard Space Flight Center, you know, has a policy that says let's keep 25 percent of the science mission developments in-house so that we can keep our engineers, our NASA engineers sharp on building spaceflight hardware. And in fact, that keeps the contractor community sharper too by doing 75% of those missions outside the gates. And those kinds of techniques and innovations permeate the agency.

And then now as a result, as a commercial company uh we take advantage of those having that inside information about all the good things that were done at nasa um not just the high profile um uh programs that are getting a lot of scrutiny from the congressionals and you know not not always positive you know negative for cost overruns and, but there's brilliance going on under the, under the layers of those major programs in technology and personnel development in, in real spacecraft design work. Yeah, absolutely. It sounds a lot of, uh, resonance here between yourself and, uh, we had, uh, some Axiom space talk on the podcast recently, who I believe you're a pretty connected with. Um, and there's a lot there as well on the podcast recently, who I believe you're pretty connected with.

And there's a lot there as well on the ISS side that we talked about, the crossover and the heritage that carries through. But then you take it outside, you put a new spin on it with some new political programs that are happening now, and things come together in very interesting ways. So it's cool to hear the storyline from years ago on Morpheus all the way through what will be the landing in a couple of years here. So I'm curious, with the time that we've got left, I'd love to dive into some details on Nova C. And you mentioned $77 million, about half of that is the launch cost. Sounds a lot like that's a dedicated launch to me.

I saw a note about, you know, you're flying on Falcon 9. I'm not sure if any of that's confirmed or you can talk about it at all, but I would be very curious to hear how you're looking at launch for that, how you got to the selection that you did, if you're dedicated or rideshare. Some of the details there, because I'm intrigued by the flight profile that NovaSea would take from Earth to the moon. So I'll give you a little bit about the launch vehicle negotiations that are going underway, and then Tim will talk to you a little bit about mission timeline and trajectory.

mission timeline and trajectory. But, you know, SpaceX is an amazing company and puts something like 50% of all satellites and payloads in space globally. Just incredible that how they've been able to disrupt launch costs and be able to make missions like the Nova C Intuitive Machines Mission 1 possible by reducing costs. So we're currently in talks with three launch providers, one international and two domestic. And we obviously prefer domestic launch costs or launch services. and we obviously prefer domestic launch costs or launch services um spacex is the leading uh vehicle right now and that's what we advertise in in our proposal that's what we're going to do we have some alternatives that we're thinking about and negotiating with so other than that i wouldn't advertise to say that we've actually made the final down select um but you know, we're trying to go on a reliable rocket at the right price point.

And right now, SpaceX Falcon 9 seemed to be one. We're a secondary payload. The primary payload would be one that actually has a delivery to a geosynchronous orbit. But we'd essentially take the ride for a geotransfer orbit. And then all the burns on the way to the moon would be done by the NOC. Okay. So basically, we're getting dropped off at a location where we have enough delta V to cover the entire mission all the way to landing on the moon yeah that seems to be the the new hotness lately we've seen it with bear sheet and

then uh chandra on two just launched to gto ish so it seems like this kind of class of lander size is hitching a ride to gto and heading up from there uh so it's cool to hear you know there's a lot of similarities there as far as that goes i'd say that i'd say the difference is and you you can believe we were we were working on our proposal when beer sheet was uh making their final approach to the moon and had it up on the screen and we're rooting for those guys um so very much you know the the challenges they face has been on our mind so one of the things that's a little bit different, we are doing what we call a partial TLI. So we get up to GTO,

and then when we swing back down around through periaps, we do a kick that at that point sends us on our way. So we're really minimizing the amount of time inside of the Van Allen belts and trying to make the mission as quick around Earth as possible. Of course, the step up would be a full TLI where you get up and do a direct inject. But we're a little bit quicker than some of the birds that are up that spiral around several times because we do want to get on about the business of going to the moon.

And we think that minimizing our time circling around through the charged particles around Earth is a big part of mitigating our risk. Yeah, for example, we will be six and a half days to the moon, to the lunar surface. I think that the Indian Space Agency, in their latest launch to the moon, is a 30-day transit to the moon is a 30-day transit to the moon so we take uh many less orbits uh up and down through the van allen belts than uh what they're planning and what we do what we think is that's that's a lower risk trajectory you know we're not subjecting our electronics to those uh those right that radiation environment and then are you going

to be pulling into lunar orbit before heading down to the surface, or is this a kind of direct ascent style that, I don't know if that's too common these days, but I'm curious what you're doing there. Yeah, so we are pulling into orbit. The Earth-Moon system, I'm going to geek out a little bit. Yeah, that's what we like we like that

it's a it's a fascinating clock right because you've got the you got the moon going around once a month and it's tidally locked with the earth so you always see the same face but it's at a five degree inclination to the the plane of the ecliptic the the lunar orbit is and and then on top of that you've got the earth's obliquity of 23 degrees so you know the moon apparently to the earth moves between 28 and 18 degrees uh from the uh earth's equatorial plane so there's this clock that's running all the time and if and if you do a launch into um kind of a mid-latitude or equatorial orbit, your transfer is taking you to where the moon is going to be when it crosses that plane. However, the time it crosses and the lighting condition you desire at your landing site may not line up perfectly for that month. And you only get two

shots a month for a plane or crossing of the moon because of the nature of its orbit. So there are some times where we can design a trajectory to say, yes, we'll go up, we'll do the partial TLI, we'll take a four to five day transit to the moon one day in orbit, and then we land immediately. But that specifies your, that's the key. Because what we want to do is we want to land in the lunar morning. That way we have the full illumination for our solar panels over the next 13 and a half days. So there are other missions where we'll go that if we specify a different landing site that isn't the landing site that has the perfect lighting condition upon arrival, which is dictated by this Earth-Moon clock, then we loiter. And so we spend time in lunar orbit and basically allow the moon to rotate underneath us until the landing site comes back into alignment. So there's some variability there, but it's all, as Steve said, on the matter of

a week to 10 days, something like that. So how about payload integration details? NASA has begun announcing the down selection of payloads for you know all the flights i don't think any have been particularly assigned to specific vehicles yet um what's the story there is that something that is standardized amongst payload providers or are they kind of custom one-off deals to get these attached and integrated to the lander so there's a two different um approaches here the first task order under clips for this first mission were there was available 13 nasa payloads to fly and they gave the bidders, us in our case, the option to bid a particular

suite of those payloads that would create a mission. Some people in their proposals elected to fly all of the payloads. Others elected to fly a subset that would be related science that would build off of each of the individual science experiments to create more science capability than just the sum of the parts. So that was clips one. I guess I am mission one. I guess I am mission one. Clips to mission. We're not yet released as bidders to talk to those commercial payloads. But NASA solicited, I believe, 15 NASA non NASA commercial payloads they awarded to develop those those payloads and fund it. Now they're trying to place those payloads to create missions on different CLPS landers.

So what NASA will come out with, instead of the Wild West where you bid your own, is more of a mission design where they categorize and group the payloads according to what they think are the capabilities of the various landers in the CLPS program, the nine competitors. So, for example, our mission, our lander, Nova C, 1,700 kilograms, fully loaded, which takes 100 kilograms of payload to the surface, a payload to the surface, nearly anywhere on the surface, depending on Dr. Crane's lunar illumination trajectory. But basically what we would do is NASA would put out a series of mission types, and we would bid on one of those. So I don't believe we're going to get the freedom to hand-select each payload and create our own homegrown mission.

There'll be NASA reviewing those payloads and saying these are grouped together. So let's go have certain vendors bid on certain groups of those payloads based on their class of lunar lander. I will say because it's a it's a service end to end service. end-to-end service, a large portion of the proposal materials they request from us does have to do with how do we integrate the payloads and what's our process for making sure that everything from receipt of the payload to test and checkout to environmental to then final integration on the booster, they wanted to know, you know, how, how do we basically treat their baby, and make sure that the the payload is, is has a high probability of actually making it successfully, even into orbit that we we

understand how to do payload integration. So we put a lot of time into that. But it's not a standardized thing. Every company had to come up with their own response for how would they treat the the integration challenges of these payloads. So once you're on the surface, could you give us an idea of what the surface operations will be like, how long you're expected to, you know, the lifespan of the lander and the payloads attached, any other kind of activities that would be happening on the surface? Yeah, for NovaSea, one of our design principles has been wherever possible, let's make this an integration task.

So we're putting systems together that we know will work. And one of the things that's going to leave us with is a challenge about surviving the lunar night. And so we specifically haven't put a requirement on about surviving the lunar night. And so we specifically haven't put a requirement on to survive the lunar night in our system for the first flight. So that's one of the reasons landing in a lunar morning location is important to us because it'll allow us about 13 and a half days of illumination. Our solar panels are configured to provide a surplus of power to the payloads in the landing configuration. So we'll be operating the NASA payloads once we're down for those two weeks. We'll be beaming the data down, acting as a telecommunications node, bringing that information.

and then what happens after the sun goes down is we're going to do a best effort to to keep the system uh alive through the lunar night and try to talk to it again two weeks later um it is a bittersweet moment that for this first mission we we have to try our best there and uh you know it may may be that after 28 days on the lunar surface that the cold, dark night of the moon gets to our systems. But in the future, we're going to work towards that lunar nighttime survival on other missions. So the payloads that we're carrying specifically, we have two descent and landing payloads. One's a landing velocity sensor. The other one is a plume photogrammetry experiment to evaluate the interaction of our engine plume with the lunar regolith. And then we have two science payloads that operate once we're on the surface.

One's a radio observatory, and the other one is a navigation station. So we'll run those for the next 14 days. And then as you can imagine, a photogrammetric data set of your plumes when landing is a big chunk of data. So some of the time after we land, we'll just be bringing that data home in bits and pieces to make sure that our customer gets everything they need. So for the future, you mentioned there's a couple of missions in the pipeline here,

which are all slated for Nova C, whichever ones you end up winning in this series of flights. Do you have plans for the future, maybe beyond Nova C? Or is this something that you think you're going to fly quite a lot? I'm curious if there's scale-up ideas, maybe bigger landers or reconfigured things. Any thoughts there? Oh, yeah. We absolutely have a roadmap-type architecture for intuitive machines,

and our internal program is called the Lunar Payload and Data Service Program, of which, out of that program, NASA's CLPS service opportunities are an anchor tenant for us. But what we see is we see the Nova Sea as extensible all the way to the human-landed system for Mars. And a lot of the technologies that go into that are also extensible to, I'm sorry, human landed system on the moon and extensible to Mars. If I misspoke there, the correction.

Sorry, a lot of people are getting confused these days. So don't worry about it. So what we do is basically Nova C, C is a designation for 100 kilograms. kilograms we have immediately on the drawing books as soon as we um drawing table as soon as we won this mission was nova d which is 500 kilograms to the surface of the moon and nova m which is 1000 to 1500 kilograms to the surface all of those have engine configurations that would be conducive to landing heavier and heavier cargo missions and eventually get into the human landed descent stage for the human landed system. where we're developing engine technologies and cryo storage and fluid management and precision landing technologies uh for the human landing system today already and we actually won that contract before the clips came out so we're definitely have our eyes set on the future

and uh the growth and the economy and commerce around the moon the vicinity of the moon and on the surface. And in any extensibility that takes us on to Mars where we can use in situ resource utilization to feed our LOX and liquid methane propulsive technology is a nice synchronous kind of technology development efforts. So we'll, you can be looking for us on those kinds of, uh, uh, partnerships and collaborations. That's awesome. It kind of gets into something. I always ask anyone that comes on, who's actually working in the field of, uh, what do you see intuitive machines working on in five years and in 10 years? What are those main things? Not just lunar landing technologies, but of all of the different projects that you're working on,

what are the tent poles you see five years from now, 10 years from now? That's a great question. The community is moving at such a speed now, it's almost hard to keep up with everything that NASA is doing in terms of their disruptive procurements to get to the moon by 2024. I mean, it really is an agency that has to remake itself to live or die, right? To transition from these decadal kind of major programs to, you know, building spaceflight hardware and deploying it in increments that can be done in four or five years. And so we look to support these kinds of rapid development missions for exploration for the moon and beyond over the next five years, with the human-landed system in 2024 being a target for us in particular.

And so we'll be maturing our science access to the moon, our communications protocols back to the surface of the Earth, and actually delivering cargo to support a human landed systems and community on the surface of the moon as a commercial service. And so I see that's where our business is growing and that's where our aptitude as a company is headed. And anything we can do in advanced technologies that take us on to Mars, that'll be what you'll see in the next 10 years. Yeah, I'd add to that. I think in five years, Steve's right that the change traffic is going to be tremendous and that's exhilarating and terrifying and full of opportunity all at the same

time. In 10 years, I would like for us to have regularized transportation and operations around the moon as a commercial company. Where it's, you know, Steve mentioned earlier, alluding to the success of SpaceX and their regular clip of missions and capability. And even when they have a setback, you know, they're right back on the horse and they're going again. That's where we want to be in 10 years for the moon as well just a every every year here's here's two or three missions that are going up or maybe even more maybe the the traffic will justify more transport than that but for it to be not an experiment but a regular execution of a known commodity.

That's where I think we'll be in 10 years with the moon. Yeah, I like a lot of that, what you're saying there, because Eclipse is very interesting right now in that it's related to everything that's going on with Artemis, but it's outside of the things that people tend to be arguing about these days. So you can tell this is a useful service that, you know, now is the time for it, given everything else in the industry, the lowering costs of launch and, you know, the, the innovations in building hardware, like you were talking about earlier in the show. Uh, this is a thing that we are ripe to have now is this kind of lunar payload to the surface of the moon.

Um, so regardless of what happens politically, this feels like a program that has staying power, especially at the scale that it is with prices that you're talking about here. So it's something I've been particularly excited to watch regardless of everything else going on out in the industry. So I'm really glad to have talked with you about what you're working on here, what you're seeing in the future.

Before we finish up for the day, is there anything that I should have asked you about your current plans or maybe the industry at large that you'd like to comment on? Well, Anthony, I just want to build off the last comment that you made. Major programs come and go. I think in the last 25 years, there's been 23 major programs that all have been canceled within NASA. And you sound like you understand and done a lot of research on that. But here's what happens. As we do this

program like CLPS, it is sufficiently under the radar, I believe. And it's full of success, that it's attractive to any administration going forward. Or if you can have regular access to the moon by the United States and in the U.S. economy, we've changed the commerce model around the moon. And CLIPS enables small businesses like Intuitive Machines to get to the moon for sub $100 million missions. That's affordable in these small launch packages that get and actually put science first return in critical data and maybe put cargo on the surface i think programs like clips are the way of the future for nasa to build up the u.s economic base to get us strong and have that we can get to the moon with ease as a natural deterrent to any other major power that might

want to go to the moon and then you know there's a threat of military action or or a build-up of defense what this is is just shows technical prowess by the u.s economy if multiple companies can get access to the moon readily and And so I think it's a very powerful political position for NASA to take. It's a non-political position, but it's easy for one administration to the next, one Congress to the next to approve because it's full of success. And that's what I hope we'll move forward from here with. Yeah, I think the one thing I would have asked Anthony is we're changing the delivery paradigm. And we can talk a lot about that. But maybe I'm going to listen for a podcast in your

future where you get some scientists together and ask them, how would it change the scientific instrument planning paradigm if they knew there were six affordable shots to the moon every year? And instead of designing a mission around an instrument you started designing instruments around the delivery capability how might that change and and improve and increase the the kind of science we can do where you've got these these regular shots and and payload interface guides that say if you need this much power, this much mass, we'll get you to the moon. And how does that change the way science might look at the moon and eventually even Mars? That's a great way to put it. And I think I've seen

something similar in even early days, it may be. There was some talk around a recent New Shepard launch where somebody was talking about the ability to put a payload on there fly it get it back the same day and go work on version two of it and that kind of speed of iteration is upped by flights like that and we've never seen anything like that beyond you know even suborbital space at this point so when you're talking that that cadence of launching things to the lunar surface has to have people excited. I'm excited. And I don't even, you know, this isn't my day job to do science on the moon. So if you're somebody out there, I'll have to find some, maybe you've got some interesting people I should talk to to ask that question to directly. We can talk

after the show, because I'd love to do that kind of follow up, given what we're going to see in the next few years. So thank you both so much for coming on and talking with us. This has been wonderful, and I'm sure that everyone out there loves hearing from companies. And Intuitive has been somebody I've been watching a lot the past couple of years, so I'm excited to finally have talked with you. And I'm excited, as you get closer to launch, to maybe have you back on, talk about how things are going in the future. are going in the future. Anthony, we'd be happy to get back on and tell you about all the innovative progress we've made in terms of getting to our mission in July of 2021. Yeah, thanks for having us on, Anthony.

All right, and that is it for us today. Thank you again to Steve and Tim for coming on the show. Intuitive Machines is someone pretty exciting to watch. So keep your eyes peeled. And there's a whole host of links in the show notes for you to check out and read some of things that they've been working on. Check out some photos of their hardware and everything else that you might want to look up about Nova C, Intuitive Machines overall. It's definitely worth checking out.

And once again, thank you all to who support the show out there. Mainenginecutoff.com slash support. If you want to help support this show and make more episodes like this possible. But for now, that is all I've got for you. If you've got any questions or comments, email me anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or tweet at we have Miko and I will talk to you next time. Bye.