Steve Altemus, the CEO of Intuitive Machines, has a good reason to feel optimistic. Intuitive Machines was the first private company to achieve a successful moon landing. It’s a huge accomplishment, but Altemus regards it as just the beginning.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Altemus explained that his company is ready to eventually support a lunar economy, not just as a contractor for NASA or the Pentagon. Altemus believes that Intuitive Machines is “uniquely positioned” to support lunar missions as a full-fledged commercial space services company.
This year, Intuitive Machines was solely awarded a multi-billion-dollar cislunar communications services contract. This contract means the company will provide high-bandwidth comms for Artemis, the moon exploration program, and any other mission heading to or around the moon.
Altemus declares, “This is massive. Now we have the third leg of the stool to hold up the company. We had the CLPS [commercial lunar payload services] contract, which was the delivery service; then we have the LTV [lunar terrain vehicle] contract, which is infrastructure as a service. The middle piece is really data transfer and analytics, with this commercial lunar data for Artemis — if you think about it, we now have the platform for a lunar economy. And we’re able to do it as a commercial supplier for those services.”
Government clients, civilians, and the military have pursued more economical means of accomplishing what used to be one-off missions like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the moon since 2009, mapping the lunar surface.
Though technically impressive, the nine-figure price tag was costly. One example of cost-effective solutions is SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Dragon capsules, which ferry astronauts to and from the ISS. This endeavor in the past was much more difficult and expensive.
According to Altemus, a miscommunication between NASA and Intuitive Machines resulted in the current extent of the company’s tech stack.
“When NASA first gave us the CLPS award, we had a misunderstanding. We thought they said, fly to the moon and give us data back, and you’re not permitted to use the Deep Space Network (DSN),” he explains.
The company was allowed to use the DSN but opted to work under that restriction.
“We had to, from 2019, put in place a network to communicate from Earth to the moon to our lander and back. So by necessity, we had to figure out that competency, we had to go into the communication and navigation areas, to get over the regulatory hurdles,” Altemus continues.
Operating under the self-imposed limitation resulted in the company having a far more effective solution than necessary, putting it in a prime position to vie for the lunar communications contract.
Of course, Intuitive Machines won that contract. With its enormous array, the Starlink satellite constellation might be a better fit for space communication services since it also sends radio signals from space. However, its job addresses a different problem.
“When you think about lunar communications, it’s a fundamentally different physics question,” Altemus explains. “The environments need to be understood, the distances and situations need to be understood. We’ve operated in transit to the moon, in orbit around the moon, and on the surface of the moon, using a set of commercial ground stations, a dozen radio astronomy-size dishes in different countries.”
Intuitive Machines employs 400 people in the Houston area and continues to grow.
“When I left NASA and walked out of the gates of Johnson Space Center, one of the key things I decided was that this was a fantastic place to build a company: right outside of the human spaceflight center. The talent pool in this area is incredible. We hire from all over the country, but it’s attractive here. They see the culture of the company and the energy — they can feel what it’s like to win,” Altemus says.
