Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines

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2:10Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So December 7, 1972, that was the last time humans landed on the moon, the Apollo 17 mission. Among the reasons astronauts haven't returned is because we thought we discovered most of what we needed to. And the second is that it's really, really expensive. But it turns out neither of these things is as true today. The moon may contain vast deposits of important minerals, and getting to the moon could cost a fraction of the amount it did, adjusted for inflation, of course, back in 1972. Steve Altimus is an entrepreneur who wants to make all of this happen.

2:56He founded a company called Intuitive Machines that plans to commercialize space exploration, particularly on the moon. Steve spent most of his career at NASA, And while he loved it, he was also frustrated by the bureaucracy and what he felt was the lack of ambition. And I was just getting frustrated because here I was in charge of an organization that was essentially the NFL of engineering. Right. Imagine just the premier engineering organization. Yeah. The best. Yeah. So we're like a Ferrari running at idle. Yeah. And I really wanted to step on the gas and see what we could do and not be entangled in a bureaucracy that was forced through legislative direction to kind of dither and just study capabilities.

3:47Yeah. This was during – this was 2013 I think you left. And again, not in any way to blame any particular administration because NASA budgets were just like cut, progressively cut over years. But I think during this time, the Obama administration really cut down on NASA's budget significantly. And so presumably, I mean, you had all these highly talented engineers, but there wasn't really – you were limited with what you could do. Exactly right. The moon was a four-letter word at the time. We've been there in Apollo. We don't need to go back. And so, you know, I came home for dinner one Friday evening and I told my son, you know, I'm just, NASA is just not going anywhere.

4:34And he said, Dad, you never talk bad about NASA. What's the matter? And I told him and he said, well, what are you going to do about it? And so he and I came up with an idea to put a walking robot on the moon in a thousand days. You and your son did. Yeah. So he went upstairs, made a video of a robot on the moon looking back at Earth saying, you know, I see you in sign language. Like an animated video? Yeah, an animated video. And so I took it to work on Monday and showed my divisions and said, let's go do something amazing. unleash our minds from these imposed constraints and do something that just shocks everybody and put a walking robot on the moon in a thousand days.

5:17We went ahead and built a lunar lander test bed for, to flying on earth. And we built a walking robot. We flew the walking robot to space station and we flew the lander by itself about 37 times successfully, um, launched it from earth and landed it on a simulated lunar landscape at Kennedy Space Center at the shuttle landing facility. Right. And just to be clear, you did not land a robot on the moon, just to be clear. No, the farthest we got with that robot was to deliver it to the International Space Station, where it walked up and down the space station cleaning the ductwork. Yeah. Still pretty cool.

5:58Yeah. And that was the beginning of Intuitive Machines. That was where a true sense of entrepreneurship came from. And I subsequently left the agency to form Intuitive Machines in 2013, realizing that you had to take control of your environment to make an impact. And one person was absolutely capable of changing the world. So what was the idea of Intuitive Machines? I mean, at that point, SpaceX was formed and certainly successful, and you got Blue Origin, a bunch of other private companies. What was Intuitive Machines' place in what was beginning to be a crowded environment? So the agency was still, and the executive branch and the legislature were still about a capabilities-driven architecture with no plan to go back to the moon.

6:55And so there was no real thirst to go after NASA work or to do spaceflight work. So we formed ourselves kind of as a think tank. And what we did was we stepped outside the gate of Johnson Space Center, which is here in Houston. And we said, what are the industries in and around us? Well, it's mainly oil and gas, oil and gas, healthcare, or the Texas Medical Center is one of the largest medical centers in the world and aerospace right outside of Johnson Space Center. So let's solve intractable problems in those three industries, um, using our human space flight engineering techniques and methodologies and practices, which are, you know, highly refined.

7:40And that was the Genesis. That's all I had was like that idea. And I struck, uh, a deal with my co-founder, Cam Gaffarian, and we shook hands over a dinner meeting. And he says, Stephen, it would be a shame if the music in your head was never played. Let's go do this. I'll support you. I'll invest in you. Let's go build this company. All right. So the idea was to develop capabilities to land material or humans specifically on the moon? Was that what you were aiming to do? At the time, no, it actually wasn't. What we were trying to do was to provide solutions for those industries. And so we were inventing.

8:32We had 24 inventions in the first five years of the company. We had four ventures that were spinning out of the company. We were just producing things. One of them was a long range over the horizon fixed wing drone, a 55 pound class drone that could avoid traffic in the airspace and fly over the horizon for pipeline inspections. Well, that all was well and good. And we were kind of, you know, bouncing on the bottom somewhat, you know, single digit millions revenue, not really gaining traction with any of the inventions we found it difficult to work in the healthcare industry and to provide medical devices in that institutional bureaucracy of healthcare.

9:24We had trouble breaking into oil and gas and the drones were restricted by the FAA. The regulations weren't allowing them to fly in the airspace. Where it turned, Guy, was in 2018, the National Security Council and the National Space Council declared that the moon was now of strategic interest. China was coming on strong, and the U.S. needed to set the norms and behaviors of how we live and work in space to be more peaceful and more civilian-focused. And so they created a directive that said, let's return humans to the moon in a sustainable way. And that was in 2018. What you're talking about is the United States government obviously looking at what China was doing.

10:16They did eventually land a spacecraft on the moon in 2019. India would follow suit in a couple years after that. So presumably the U.S. government is thinking, if other countries are going to start making claims on the moon here, we better get back into this space. Yeah, exactly. The Chinese were ramping up their program and having success after success after success, orbiting the moon, landing on the far side of the moon, roving on the moon, returning a sample from the moon, those kinds of things. So you, at this point now, start to shift your focus on figuring out how to get a lander onto the moon.

10:59Let's kind of talk a little bit about, there's so many things to talk about, the cost, the associated costs, the complexity. but I want to just go right to the jugular here. Why? What is it about? I mean, we've been to the moon. Anyone who goes to the Air and Space Museum can touch that moon rock. It's amazing and inspiring. But from what I gathered, even going to the Air and Space Museum, is that we've gathered pretty much everything we need to gather. We've gathered the rock samples. We know what the atmosphere is like. And there really isn't that much left to learn about the moon. Is that wrong?

11:37You know, think about trying to describe what the planet Earth looks like. From those handful of missions where you have just small, small excursions away from your lander, you know nothing about the planet Earth at that point. You don't know oceans. You don't know terrain. You don't know mountains and desert. You know where you landed from a very, like looking through a straw, very small amount of knowledge. Right. I think that's where we are now. You know, for all of the moon rocks that we brought back in the history of humanity, there's only 360 kilograms of material. There are so many unknowns about the moon.

12:18How much water ice is entrained in the soil? Where are the rare metals and minerals that have bombarded the moon for— Four and a half billion years. Billion years, right? So four and a half billion years. What are those? And what are the constituents of the moon? Is it a source of rare materials for us back on Earth? And that information, you have to gather that by having a physical presence there in some capacity. You can't gather that through, you know, satellites or other orbiting equipment? Well, certainly from Earth and from satellites in and around the vicinity of the moon, you can gather imagery data that can tell you, hey, let's go to the South Pole.

13:07The South Pole looks like it has an incredible amount of water ice entrained in the soil. Let's go see if it's actually there. How much water is there? Can we make drinking water from that? Can we make propellants, liquid oxygen from that? Can we make consumables for humans from that? And so you can get some idea. And the question is, do you want to take the next step and actually go explore on the surface? We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more on why going to the moon is worth it and how collaboration with SpaceX is making it all possible. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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16:19Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. Here's more of my conversation with Steve Altimas, co-founder and CEO of Intuitive Machines. I guess my question is, and I'm not pushing back to be difficult, I'm just really curious, because part of me is like, well, if this was really critical, you would think that these missions wouldn't have stopped in 1972, that they would continue on. I mean, they're very expensive, you know, maybe$100 billion. That's what NASA estimated to put a man or woman back on the moon today. But so do we know there are rare earth minerals? I mean, you mentioned this idea of the moon being bombarded for billions of years, which makes sense.

16:58But at the same time, like, so has Earth. The moon is much smaller than the Earth. So, like, I mean, how often does it get hit by stuff? Well, it's, you know, you could see all the pockmarks on the moon with the naked eye, right? And then with a telescope, it's just a Swiss cheese. Yeah. But, you know, if we think about mining, um, at the rate that we consume rare earth minerals and materials, we now have pristine areas that would have to be strip mined to find the last bastion of materials that we're looking for. Um, we don't want to do that. We don't want to destroy our earth. So if there's an alternate source, mining on the moon can become a real source of commerce for us as a planet.

17:44And again, you're working on this. It hasn't happened yet because I think the only countries that have landed besides the US and Russia are India and China. And I think that India and China are the only countries that have landed anything on the moon since the year 2000, if I'm not mistaken. No, you're correct. In fact, the very recent history, it's only been India and China, India being the latest. And you saw the recent Russian mission to the moon failed on the way. That failed. Yeah. And I read something like 45 % of attempts at crash and burn. So why is it so hard? I mean, if the United States did it, you know, multiple times in the 60s and late 60s and early 70s, we know the terrain.

18:28I mean, why is it so hard to land something successfully on the moon? Why do they crash so often? It's an incredible challenge to go to the moon when you transition from flying, highly dynamic environment of flying from Earth through the atmosphere into space, and then capturing into the moon, orbiting the moon, descending down to a surface that's not defined by sea level. It's a very mountainous terrain with craters and there's no navigation. And so what you have to do with no pilot in command, have the ability to navigate on your own, to carry everything with you you need to sort out where the surface is.

19:15We have kind of a mean surface of the moon, a general idea of what the surface of the moon reference line is. Yeah. But if you land on a crater. You're done. You're toast. Either a rock, a slope. Yeah. So that's part of the challenge. So, all right. In 2019, NASA awarded three companies, private companies, contracts to build robotic lunar landers. Your company, Intuitive, was one of them. and you obviously have been building it and testing it. First of all, where do you test it? Do you like to, I don't know, like Hawaii? Like where do you, just what kind of rocky surface do you look for? So what we do is right here in Houston, we have been building the Nova Sea Lunar Lander, which is about 2 ,000 kilograms, stands about 14 feet high.

20:16maybe six or seven feet diameter. And we make everything basically vertically integrated as a company. There's a few items that we purchase, but a bulk of them we manufacture in-house. We actually additively manufacture or 3D print our own engines. And then we test them right here. We're on Spaceport Houston, the Ellington Airport. I'm looking at a photo of the Nova scene. It may be an old photo, but it's interesting because it doesn't look that different from, you know, lunar landers of the 60s and 70s. I mean, it has sort of the same shape, sort of a vertical kind of, you know, cylinder with like tentpole legs.

20:56And I'm sure it's much more sophisticated. But in terms of the design, are there reasons why that design is not that different? Yeah. So you want to have the lightest weight lander that you can because it takes so much energy to get out of the gravity well of earth to the moon and then descend it softly to the surface of the moon inside its gravity well. So all of that is energy management. You know, our business economics for the lander are to sell payloads at a price per kilogram. So every kilogram of lander mass is one less kilogram of payload mass that we could sell to make the business profitable.

21:43Yeah, let's talk about the business model. I mean, obviously you had to raise a ton of money just to do the research and to build prototypes. But tell me a little bit about the model. I mean, basically you will sell material that is gathered from the moon that returns to Earth. Is that initially how you're going to make money? We've actually diversified to the point where our business model is really to install the infrastructure in and around the moon to support sustained human presence. So if you think about it like an expeditionary force, the first thing you need to do is land. Then you establish communications.

22:26Then you establish navigation to move further away from your lander. And then you start bringing up heavier and heavier cargo. So we built an entire mini Apollo program, if you will. One that you could operate the mission from a mission control. And then you need a rocket to get you off Earth. And we contract with SpaceX to buy their Falcon 9 rockets. You go on the rocket, yeah. And they take us through that first phase out of the Earth's atmosphere and into space. So now we have the infrastructure to launch and transport our lander to the moon. And the first lander takes about 130 kilograms of payload to the surface.

23:08And what's on there? So we put scientific instruments. Right, because these are unmanned, we should be clear. Totally robotic, autonomous missions at this point. They're really precursors to the human missions. So like rover type things that can basically leave the lander and start to poke around? Yeah, we have rovers, hoppers, which is a drone, rocket-pailed drone that can fly 25 kilometers away from the lander. All kinds of items that extend from scientific instruments to commercial sponsorships to art projects to telescopes that stare at the Milky Way. Yeah. All of those are payloads that we fly and we can charge roughly a million dollars a kilogram to take those payloads to the moon, whether that's a government payload or commercial payload.

24:03So if you can do that, that's roughly a hundred million dollars plus of revenue that you can generate with each mission to the moon. Now you say, okay, how do you fly fixed price to the moon for less than a hundred million dollars? And you have to figure that out. Yeah. And that I think is disruption. The disruption of, you said it earlier, that it costs$100 billion for Apollo missions. And we're trying to land on the moon for$100 million. It's orders of magnitude cheaper. Yeah. Launch access has become affordable again. SpaceX caused that disruption and it's fantastic for us. I understand the need to commercialize this because obviously taxpayers cannot finance these missions in perpetuity.

24:53So it makes sense that you've got private companies doing it. But I imagine you mentioned you're operating out of Houston, obviously important oil and gas center of the United States of the world really. Imagine there's an incentive from some of these companies to have some equipment as part of the payload in order to use it as a way to explore potential for extracting minerals. How does – I mean how would it work in terms of like claiming a part of the moon to extract material? Like who owns – how do we figure out who owns what? I mean, I know that there are international treaties, but what happens if your lander discovers some rare earth mineral in that area?

25:41Who can claim that? That's a great question. And there's very little policy and governance, but there is some framework. So the Outer Space Treaty governs how we live and work in space. But how do we live and work on the moon? The United States offered to the world an agreement called the Artemis Accords, and it's very friendly to allowing commercialization rights of the moon. So if you land on the moon, you can bring back samples and own those samples per the Artemis Accords. It's not where they belong to the sovereign governments. They can belong to commercial companies. And I think that's important for the future of building a space economy centered around the moon.

26:35And I'm sure there will be a lot of legal opinions when the first samples come back. Yeah. But technically, you don't own the real estate if you land. It's not the frontier days of the Wild Wild West where you went out and did - Plant a flag and it's yours. You plant the flag and you own the land, the property that staked it out. You land, you own what they call a heritage site. And that means other countries or other companies that want to fly near you, if you're declared as a heritage site, need to coordinate with you before they land and damage any of the equipment that you have there. But you don't own the land or the mineral rights because you've landed there.

27:18but what you cash on the surface and what you bring back can be yours. We're going to take another quick break, but when we come back, why Steve is embracing the possibility of failure as his first lunar launch approaches. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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