‘Battle-hardened’ Intuitive Machines takes its next steps toward a lunar economy

It’s been a year since Intuitive Machines (IM) made history with the first private soft landing and first American spacecraft since the Apollo program to land on the moon, after a nail-biting descent that came perilously close to failing. But this time around, they’re veterans. As they ready their second mission, IM-2, with an updated lunar lander named Athena, the vibe at the startup’s Houston headquarters is decidedly more relaxed and confident.

“We’ve made 85 improvements to the vehicle and the process used for building and flying it,” says Trent Martin, IM’s senior VP of space systems. “That includes 10 for landing and determining its location in space, which we struggled with during the first mission. We’re not nearly spending as many late nights as we did getting ready for IM-1.”

Not that they don’t still worry. “This is space flight,” he says. “And space flight is hard.”

Athena is slated to lift off from Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 at 7:17 p.m. ET on February 26 for a 10-day mission at the Mons Mouton plateau near the lunar south pole. (Click here for ways to watch.)

Athena, a 14-foot hexagonal cylinder on six landing legs, will shuttle several NASA and commercial payloads to the lunar surface to test exploration vehicles and the first communications network on the moon; drill and analyze samples of lunar soil (called regolith); and map precious resources, like water ice.

The roughly $100 million mission turned a 10% profit, thanks to funding from NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program and Tipping Point Initiative, commercial payloads, and three additional rideshares for satellites that will deploy to other destinations after Athena detaches from the rocket post-launch. Most are to support NASA’s Artemis mission to establish sustainable infrastructure on the moon and in space, rather than rely solely on Earth for materials. In situ resources like oxygen and helium-3 can be used to make rocket fuel, water, and energy, while water can also make fuel and be a source for astronauts. “Water is a building block for just about every chemical process that we would like to use on the moon,” says Martin.

Athena is an upgrade from IM’s first lander, Odysseus, and part of its methalox-propelled Nova-C class of landers. Odysseus might have crashed were it not for some lightning engineering. A missed safety switch prevented the lander’s altimeter lasers from firing to the surface to gauge its altitude and descent speed. Unable to reprogram substitute lasers from a NASA payload, they imaged a crater, estimated its size, and used that to approximate the lander’s altitude. Given the circumstances, they came astonishingly close—Odysseus touched down 4 mph too fast, broke a gear, and tipped over. But it still worked.

“The lander showed incredible resilience, but it was a miracle we were able to do it with a measurement we took from 85 kilometers [53 miles] high,” says CEO Steve Altemus. “We were all pretty steady during it. But afterward, it was like, ‘Oh my God, what did we just do?’”

For this next mission, the company not only revised its lander engineering but also began diversifying beyond lunar landers. One of the IM-2 payloads, the Intuitive Machines’ Micro Nova Hopper One, is a 29-inch, 77-pound rocket-propelled drone designed to explore areas inaccessible to ground rovers. Last fall, the firm unveiled Moon Racer, a two-passenger prototype Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) that can carry and tow a combined 2,600 pounds, that’s earmarked for a future manned mission.

“We’re maturing [from] a startup having these aspirations and initial ideas to where we’re now battle-hardened by mission one,” says Altemus. “We’re providing and building a cis-lunar economy [offering] three pillars of service: the delivery to the moon and ride share, the data transmission and navigation services for communicating around the moon, and infrastructure as a service. That’s the beginning of an economy and everyone can take advantage of that.”

Prospecting for resources

The Micro-Nova Hopper, nicknamed the Hopper and Grace (after computer science pioneer Grace Hopper), will gauge surface temperatures and water distribution using instruments from Hungary and Germany. Although designed for a 15-mile distance, it will make five shorter parabolic hops and level flights to hard-to-reach areas, including a crater that has never seen sunlight.

“It provides you extreme mobility in places that rovers can’t go,” says Martin. “So, if you want to go into a pit or a lava tube—or a permanently shadowed region with steep walls, we can do it with a rocket-propelled drone.”

At the landing site, NASA’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 (PRIME-1) will operate a meter-long drill and a mass spectrometer to look for and analyze sub-surface resources that might sustain future human exploration, plus measure forces and temperature. The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT), from Blue Origin’s Honeybee Robotics, will bore three feet deep and bring regolith samples to the surface where the spectrometer will measure the compositions of volatile gases escaping from the material.

As it’s done with other landers, NASA is outfitting Athena with a Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA), mirrors that reflect laser light back to an orbiting spacecraft initially emitting the light to determine the lander’s location. LRAs will enable precision landmarks for Artemis sites to guide the arriving landers.

Lunar Outpost’s Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) is slated to be the first commercial rover on another planetary body. Sporting internal prospecting instruments and an MIT-designed CW Time of Flight camera, the 22-pound solar-powered vehicle will travel about a mile from the lander, 3D mapping the lunar surface and scouting for ice and other valuable resources. Another MIT device, AstroAnt, a .95-ounce micro-rover with magnetic wheels, will roam MAPP’s surface to measure its internal temperature to assess MAPP’s health—a proof of concept for future iterations that might monitor and fix space hardware remotely. “It’s very meta,” laughs Justin Cyrus, Lunar Outpost’s founder and CEO.

MAPP carries drills and wheels designed to grip the powdery regolith with little excavators to collect and analyze samples that NASA will eventually retrieve. The space agency will pay the Denver company $1 to transfer the sample ownership to set a legal precedent and procedural framework for a private company to own and sell what it mines on a celestial body. NASA has similar contracts with other companies for future samples. Considering the investment cost and potential rewards—helium-3, for example, is among the most expensive substances on Earth due to its scarcity, but abundant on the moon—this step gives companies more confidence they won’t be legally challenged before spending billions to extract resources on a large scale.

“If you’re looking at resources not only on the moon but the near-Earth asteroids, it’s significantly more resources than we’ve ever had access to,” says Cyrus.

Can you hear me now?

In a first step towards a lunar cellular system, Nokia Bell Labs is providing a 4G LTE communications network between MAPP, the Hopper, and a Lunar Surface Communications System (LSCS) on the lander serving as a cell tower. The rovers, carrying antennas and radio equipment, will venture from the lander and beam signals back to the LSCS, which will measure the speeds and bandwidth. This network will also enable the three vehicles to talk to one another. The lander will sport a direct-to-Earth radio connection so mission controllers can receive data and images and remotely operate the probes.

“The main goal was to prove to NASA that it can take the cellular technology and adapt it for space, compared to using UHF or proprietary technology,” says Nokia Bell Labs president Thierry Klein. Additionally, some of the data collected from the rovers would transmit over the Nokia network to the lander and relayed back to Earth.

Commercial symbiosis

Columbia Sportswear continues its symbiotic partnership with IM after IM-1 helped the clothing company perfect its Omni-Heat Infinity insulation—a lightweight, breathable, heal-reflecting foil used in its winter jackets. On the first mission, IM applied it to one panel to buffer Odysseus’ cryogenic propellant tanks from extreme radiation and a 450-degree Fahrenheit temperature range. This time, it’s covering more of the lander packages.

“Columbia’s materials enabled a more cost-effective and nuanced method of thermal management than off-the-shelf aerospace materials from the Apollo missions,” says Haskell Beckham, Columbia’s VP of innovation. “We also learned that in space you typically have multilayers of installation. So, we took this information, brought it back to our lab in Portland, and made a jacket where we had the insulating layer, not only on the lining but also on the shelf fabric, which made it much warmer.”

But wait, there’s more . . . 

Other commercial payloads include Dymon’s YAOKI rover, IM’s first Japanese commercial payload, that will capture images of the lunar surface. Lonestar Data Holdings is sending a data center that will test data transmission between Earth and the moon. The Florida start-up wants to establish a server system on the moon for extremely secure data storage for disaster recovery. After proving its software on IM-1, Lonestar will now test its ability to remotely load, store, and retrieve data from the server. 

Three satellites will hitch rideshares, deploying