From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.
On episode 373, NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services project scientist and Intuitive Machines President and CEO discuss upcoming IM-2 mission and what’s in store for this delivery to the lunar surface. This episode was recorded on January 23, 2025.
Transcript
Leah Cheshier (Host)
Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center. Episode 373, Intuitive Machines Returns To The Moon. I’m Leah Cheshier, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers and astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human space flight and more. As NASA aims to develop a sustainable presence on and around the moon we know their strength in going together, with other agencies, countries and commercial companies. Part of this is through the commercial lunar payload services initiative, often abbreviated to CLPS, Intuitive Machines, based out of Houston, is one of the companies selected as a CLPS vendor in 2018 and has been awarded four task orders to deliver scientific instruments and technology instruments to the lunar surface. Intuitive Machines launched their first mission, known as IM, in February 2024 and became the first commercial company to land on the moon on February, 22 2024. Their second mission, IM2 is slated for launch in February 2025 with an early March landing date. IM2 is scheduled to land at the lunar South Pole, delivering one of the first on site or in situ resource utilization demonstrations on the moon. The NASA PRIME1 payload will use a drill and mass spectrometer to measure the volatile content of sub service materials. In addition, this flight will also carry several commercial technology demonstrations as part of NASA’s tipping point initiative. Joining me today to break down the mission are Sue Lederer, the CLPS project scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and Steve altimus, President and CEO of Intuitive Machines. Let’s dive in!
Leah Cheshier
Hi Sue and Steve. Thank you so much for joining us here today on Houston, we have a podcast.
Sue Lederer
Nice to be here.
Steve Altemus
Great to be here today.
Leah Cheshier
We’ve got a lot of exciting things to talk about, but before we dive into Intuitive Machines, to the second mission coming up, a little recap of what IM1 was like, I want to know a little bit more about each of you. So Sue, we’ll start with you. Tell me about where you’re from, what you studied in school, other roles that you’ve had up until this point.
Sue Lederer
I came from a place that felt very much like Houston. The last two days up in northern Wisconsin, and got my PhD in astronomy, astrophysics. From there, I went to Houston, here, in fact, to JSC to be a postdoc, and started working on spacecraft missions, the Hayabusa mission that brought back a sample from the asteroid Itokawa. Since then, I then took a position as a physics professor in Southern California, then popped back to be a space scientist, because how can you pass up the opportunity to work for NASA full time for the rest of your life? I think you can’t pass that up and have done things like building a telescope and studying comets, asteroids, orbital debris, and even helping to discover some exoplanets as well around some ultra cool dwarf stars. And that is their actual description, as well as their vernacular description. I think
Leah Cheshier
That’s a really broad background you’ve gotten to, you’ve gotten to do a lot of different things
Sue Lederer
Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. So even though my background is as a scientist, I like to play engineer on the side as well, and so that’s really helped a lot in preparing for missions like this.
Leah Cheshier
Steve, tell me where are you from? How did you get into the space world? Well,
Steve Altemus
that’s an interesting story. I went from Pennsylvania, Philadelphia area, and my family was all blue collar construction workers kind of thing. And I had this fascination with technical things and how things worked. So while everybody else was thinking about how to build things, I was thinking about how to build technical things. And so I wanted to be a pilot. I went to Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, and I found out very quickly that I probably couldn’t afford the degree to get a degree and then to learn flying lessons and all that. So I went into aeronautical engineering, which is better anyway, because you get to learn how everything works. And while at Embry Riddle, unfortunately, I was witness to the Challenger disaster as it flew and had the accident over Florida, and so I saw it as I walked across the campus. And I just had a feeling that someday I would be working in the space program. That was the moment that I recall, well, I worked, went back to Pennsylvania, worked on engineering helicopter systems, mechanical systems, that kind of stuff for the army helicopters. And then I ended up leaving there and getting a job at NASA, at Kennedy Space Center of all places. And I was in operations for a while and became a shuttle test director, where I directed. Launches of the space shuttle and landing and the convoy commanding for of the return of the shuttles, and ended up leading the launch and landing Division at NASA. Well, then we had the other accident, the Columbia accident, and I was in charge of putting all the 85,000 pieces of debris back together, and, you know, determining the forensics of the accident from the debris, and led a team of about 400 people there at the Shuttle Landing Facility. Well, that was such a high visibility activity that people from Johnson Space Center noticed and asked me to move to Johnson Space Center, where I became the head of engineering for all of the human space flight programs for Johnson Space Center, and I led that for about seven years before becoming the deputy director of Johnson Space Center. So I was steeped in engineering of human space flight, and after about 25 years at NASA, I didn’t work my whole life at NASA, but a lot of it, I formed Intuitive Machines, and I am the co founder, president and CEO from its inception. And we started as a think tank, and we had 25 inventions in the first five years of the company, and four ventures that spun out into other companies. But we really didn’t have a true idea of who we were. We were just solving tough problems using engineering, until the moon became of strategic interest again in 2018 where we, I guess, there was a strategic directive from the National Space Council that said the moon is of strategic interest. Which is strategic directive, one which says we will spend money to put humans on the moon again. And somebody came into the office and said, You guys are the best lunar landing company there is. We weren’t even in the lunar landing business,
but we had done that at NASA. We had built Morpheus Project-M the liquid oxygen liquid methane lander that we flew like 37 times. It was an earth based test bed. The project was originally to put a walking robot on the moon in 1000 days. Like speed entrepreneurship, you know, clear technology advances, you know, one of those. And so inside of NASA’s where I learned about entrepreneurship, and that’s when I got the bug to start a business. And so when the moon became of interest, we pivoted the whole business to putting in a lunar infrastructure and building a lunar economy. And the commercial lunar payload service contract was how that dream was reignited. And here we are in 2025 now working on our second mission to the moon.
Leah Cheshier
So what year did you found Intuitive Machines.
Steve Altemus
We founded Intuitive Machines in 2013 Okay, and we’ve been in business, what for 11 years now, going on 12, yeah.
Sue Lederer
And if you’re gonna want some sort of a problem that you really need engineering to solve, flying to the moon is a really excellent way to take that kind of background with all your employees and apply it to a real world, world problem.
Steve Altemus
Yes, first commercial company to ever land on the moon successfully.
Leah Cheshier
Oh, yeah, we’re gonna talk about it for sure. Sue, how did you get involved with Intuitive Machines, but on the NASA side?
Sue Lederer
So I had come from the orbital debris program office, and my goal there was to make sure that we had a telescope that was built on an island in the middle of nowhere, next to nothing, called Ascension Island, the MCAT telescope. And as that lead for the project, I was myself and one of the women that really led the design and build of the MCAT telescope. I learned a lot of project management, how to do engineering. If anybody’s ever written requirements, you know that if it isn’t difficult, it probably isn’t written well, but all of those pieces are the different kinds of pieces that you need in order to understand how to develop payload projects, and when CLPS we had finished building the telescopes, gotten it to the point of operational. The contractor side took over that side of the telescope, and the new challenge that CLPS offered was being able to take all of that background, combined with my science background, and be able to apply it to missions going to the moon. So even though my background in comets, asteroids, orbital debris, exoplanets wasn’t specifically lunar, all of the challenges that you have to put together and all of the things you need to figure out how to do the science and the engineering dovetail really well into what we do as project scientists in helping to ensure that the payload teams are ready for operations and even understanding the engineering side of the integration onto the lander. So that’s how I ended up going into CLPS. From there, the CLPS office had a number of task orders that had already been assigned to particular vendors. And they are the ones that decided who was going to be assigned to which task order. So it was somebody up at headquarters who made the decision on which task order I would be assigned to. Ironically, when I was selected for the Intuitive Machines task order, I turned to my husband, who happened to have led Morpheus back in the day, and thought, Okay, well, this is going to be really excellent, because when I have all the engineering questions about how Morpheus runs, we could just, you know, hit pause on the TV on the couch on the weekend and have a little tutorial about how locks methane engines work. And I can tell you that’s happened on a number of occasions. So it’s worked really well. He his background right now is working on the Gateway program, but all the Morpheus background has been really helpful for my learning curve in how landers work as well.
Leah Cheshier
You have your own subject matter expert.
Sue Lederer
Exactly, exactly.
Steve Altemus
Sue was quite upset with me when I gave John a lance in a tour of the mission control before she got an opportunity to tour Mission Control. So I remiss that gave her a tour.
Sue Lederer
Yeah. So yeah, it was, it was, we’re in the middle of the mission, and I had to sneak him on site because he was so excited. He knows so many of the people that work at I am having worked with them at Morpheus. So I was waiting to sneak him in, looking around the corner, the elevator doors open and out, he walks with Steve and go straight into Mission Control. I’m like, wait a minute. No, it’s great. He definitely earned that. That offer from Steve
Steve Altemus 11:32
Sure did. Wow.
Leah Cheshier 11:36
Well, let’s talk about IM1 Intuitive Machines. First mission to the moon. Like you said earlier, you’re the first commercial company to put a lander on the moon. I got to be there that day. It was really exciting at Intuitive Machines, just a very small part of the broadcast, but oh my goodness, it was so electric. Everyone was so excited. It was buzzing and, you know, figuring out last minute details, as you know, we were preparing for Descent and Landing. So what kind of expertise Did you rely on to make that successful?
Steve Altemus
Oh wow, there’s decades of experience, centuries of experience within the team at Intuitive Machines. And, you know, I think there’s a lot of secrets or or tricks of the trade, or, you know, just hard work, or organizational items, leadership items that you could quote to say, here’s you write a book about, about, here’s how, why we were successful. But the team was so mission driven, so focused on being successful, we didn’t even prepare for failure. We were determined to make it work. And, you know, a lot of hard work and long hours went into building the lander, learning how to do it. Because when you’re flying to the moon, doing a first thing that’s never been done before, you can’t do it like everyone else. There’s no textbook. So we’re flying fixed price to the moon, for about $100 million in a span it takes to get an under degree, undergraduate degree, about four years. And you had to throw the rule book out and figure out a way not to be held up by any obstacle, technical, regulatory, whatever reason, contractually, you had to get to the moon somehow. And we put that into the team, where they were solving problems all the time. Whatever came up, they would tackle that problem and find a way to get through it. So when we approached the mission, we had that in our culture already, where there was no problem that we couldn’t find our way through. Now, as we launch the mission and we start to fly it, we’re learning how to fly a mission. You know, it’s like you build a Ferrari, never having learned to drive a car, and you’re supposed to see right? So how do you drive a Ferrari? Well, how do you drive the Nova C lander? And we found that it took us some time to kind of sort out what was going wrong, what operationally we could fix. But Odie, our lander, his nickname, flew beautifully, and when we took the constraints off, we loosened up some of the error, error bands. We kind of let it fly more autonomously. It performed beautifully. And so we’re very excited. But we have this saying where all the way through building the lander and up to flight. And through flight, we were getting, you know, bitten by alligators that any one of them could have taken the mission out. And our job was to turn the alligators into snapping turtles, so that they they sort of hurt you, but they didn’t. They weren’t, you know, deadly or mortal.
Sue Lederer
It was very interesting to watch it from our side of things. We started out with NASA being the customer and Intuitive Machines being the ones who were it was their mission, and we were just one piece of that mission. But as things progressed, and there were all of the different pieces that we needed to fit together, we really formed as a team and really started to just sit down at the table. We were having conversations in the hallways and in the back rooms and anywhere you could find somebody. We were really working together. It very much felt to me the whole time during the mission like living a movie, right? You watch Apollo 13 and all the challenges that they have to fix, and watching their team four, which was the troubleshooting team, where they would come in and say, there was this thing that they were working on, and the next thing you knew, Okay, we solved that. Oh, but there’s this other thing, and then they would solve that. And watching them go through that process of all the troubleshooting and just solving them one after another after another, it was really inspiring to see them working so hard and so passionately together as a team, including having bunks and, you know, in the office, so that people could actually take a little rest but still be available, because they are so focused and and so dedicated to the mission succeeding.
Leah Cheshier
That’s fascinating. And I’m glad that you touched on that, because it makes me think about,
we recently had Gene Kranz and Jerry Griffin, Fred Hayes on the podcast. And so these are men who were in all of those firsts, you know, those Apollo firsts, and even earlier. And so I’m thinking, how do you plan for a space walk when you’ve never done a space walk? And so hearing all of the expertise, like you said, Steve, it’s really decades of experience that you have on your team into this, and I would be interested sue in learning more about how do NASA and Intuitive Machines work together to make sure both parties needs are met, and that’s both during Mission Planning and Execution.
Sue Lederer
There are a lot of pieces that go into that puzzle, right? We have people on our side who, for each task order, there’s an Integration Manager. Frank Marino is our Integration Manager, and I’m the the project scientist. And project with the J is we’ve we’ve identified ourselves as the PJs, which is great, because so much of our planning is done from the confines of the home in our PJs. So I took that to heart, yeah, slippers during the Home Mission, just to make sure that that we’re represented. So in the process of planning, we have regular meetings making sure that we have the plan set aside for how we integrate things properly. We have separate meetings set aside to make sure that we’re talking with the payload teams and with Intuitive Machines on how the operations happen. There’s plenty of this is how we’re going to do it, as well as having Sims, tabletop walkthroughs, things of this nature in preparation, to make sure that we understand how to operate, they understand how we want to operate, so that once we’re at the point of the mission phase, that that’s comfortable. So especially if things don’t go exactly as planned, we have the process in place for how we’re working with them, really, as a team,
Steve Altemus
it’s quite a collaborative effort. I think, working with Sue and her team and NASA, Intuitive Machines, working together badgeless, you know, at some point, if you think about it, beyond just the CLPS program we had Johnson Space Center helping with tanks and with analysis, we had actually embedded a crew of NASA mid career people in the company to help us develop the Nova C. They had real tasks to do, and we had worked that with the center to exchange employees or workforce. We worked with Glenn Research Center on a technology to measure the quantities in the tanks while we’re flying. So it’s called RF mass quantity gaging. So that worked? Well, we worked with Langley Research Center on the NASA Doppler LiDAR, these lasers that are we reprogrammed into the laser range finder registers when the range finders wouldn’t work. We worked with Marshall Space Flight Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on the Deep Space Network, Kennedy Space Center, all of NASA, plus the FAA, plus globally, we worked with our eight different ground stations in six different countries, and it was quite an international, globally integrated effort, and primarily with Intuitive Machines and NASA together, It was great.
Sue Lederer
And let’s not forget the other very important people, right? We talk about the technical but the procurement side, getting the contracts in place, the PAO folks, both sides are working together. So we have our PAO folks and their PAO folks. So those are the people where they are on the down and in and may not get as much face time, but are super critical for the success of the mission as well.
Leah Cheshier
Yeah and to share the story.
Steve Altemus
Yeah like we’re doing today, getting the story out. I mean, was amazing. Yeah, it’s been fantastic.
Leah Cheshier
So after touchdown on I am one the lander tipped over a little bit. It was, it was a really exciting way to. For the call that it had successfully landed, and then it took a couple of days found out that it had tipped over a little bit, but you were still able to gather some of the data that you were looking for on that mission. So what did you learn?
Steve Altemus
Oh, essentially, we gained and collected all the data that NASA had asked for. I think there was a few things that didn’t quite go exactly right, but when we went to do the power descent all the way down to the surface, we found out the range finders, the laser range finders, or laser altimeters, weren’t working. We found that out, and tried to figure out a way around it, but as a result, we landed at a vertical descent rate that was a couple meters per second faster than what we wanted. We wanted one meter per second. I think we landed at three meters per second, and then our horizontal velocity across the surface was about two meters per second. So we caught one of the landing gear and it broke. And therefore when we went to stand up, it just gently leaned over, and it was on a hill, so it was about 30 degree angle. But we learned how to communicate when your antenna is pointing right at the surface. So we bounced the signal out of one antenna off the surface, reverse polar did reverse polarization into another antenna and then back down to the ground. So we learned what multipath was on the south pole of the moon, which was a concern by the NASA folks on how are you going to operate on the moon at the South Pole, where you’re at a low angle, communicating back to Earth. And we did that because we were at a very low angle to the surface, and we were communicating everything came back on that one little antenna receiving the signal, having been bounced off the surface back into the vehicle. So that was quite an interesting thing, but we learned a lot about the environment. We learned about the dust plume that was coming out from underneath this liquid oxygen, liquid methane engine, and as we approached the surface, you could see the dust and the ejecta, they call it, going straight out from the bottom of the lander, not in a plume cloud, like you would think, but straight out. And then some of that goes actually into orbit and becomes debris and then falls back to the surface. So Sue would know about that we learned about the RF spectrum, or the electromagnetic signals around the moon, the background signals from one of the payloads which deployed antennas and could measure what the what the signals were that were coming from, just the ambient noise around the moon, which has never been studied before. That was one of the most fascinating experiments. So quite a bit of learning, I would say, every time we fly as whether it’s an agency or a company or or an international partner, there’s so much learning, there’s so much experience gained, and so it’s very important as we move forward in our Moon Program, is to get flying and fly often with a regular cadence submission, so that we can just gain that knowledge. That’s what happened in Apollo, right in the Gemini and Mercury days. And in Apollo, we flew and we flew and we flew and we learned on every single mission. And that’s what’s happening now.
Sue Lederer
So when I see for myself that I’m part of something where you have a plan set forward, and the plan goes as expected. You learn something. It’s generally something pretty good when things go off nominal, and you have to sit in really think tank how to solve it, what’s going on, the amount that you learn is 10 fold more than if things just go nominally. So I’d like to thank Steve and team for taking one for the team, because the amount of information that we learned by landing sideways and seeing how everything bounced, the signals coming and going, we’re bouncing off the moon. This has been a big question mark. There are theories and ideas, but to actually see it in practice is a huge learning curve that we have needed to get over. We have plans to look at that for IM2. But the learning we did on IM1 was was really important for future missions and making sure that we understand how the astronauts can work safely and be able to communicate with things bouncing off the moon and that polarization thing that was a that was not expected going into the mission. So we’ve definitely learned things about the physics of how things behave on the moon that we did not expect, which I think is really exciting personally.
Steve Altemus
Yeah, we actually got the idea to how to resolve that and get get the data from the vehicle from our ground station in Cornwall, England, at UK called coon hilly. And they spoke to us about that, and said, You need reverse polarization, is the way they talk. And we said that over and over again, and that’s how we ended up, you know, the decoder ring for how to get this, the images and the data off the vehicle.
Sue Lederer
So UK accent, Polarization, polarization. What are you saying? Yes, and we are learning a little bit of the UK accent as well.
Leah Cheshier
Fantastic. Well, I love what you said about how you learn things when the mission goes as planned, but you learn more when the mission doesn’t go as planned. And obviously this is why we do simulations, you know, but very rarely are the simulations that you practice really what ends up happening on the mission. And so the lessons learned from IM1 are not just beneficial to Intuitive Machines as a company, but like you’re saying, Sue to NASA as a whole, you know, we’re sending astronauts back to the moon with the Artemis program. And these missions are just lessons learned along the way of how we can best optimize those missions. And I would be interested to hear what other lessons learned we had during IM1 that we’re implementing ahead of and during IM2
Steve Altemus
Well I’ll tell you something. First point is, in response to your commentary, we stood on the shoulders of everyone who’s gone before us, right? So we get the trophy for being the first commercial company to land on the moon, but all of the issues and concerns that happened in previous lunar missions, and more recently, the lunar missions from the Baron sheet lander out of spaceIL or for the ispace mission, or for the Indian lander, or the Russian lander, all of those we saw, and we thought about those failures and implemented something on our vehicle to protect against that, whether it’s a different kind of propulsion system, whether it’s different redundancy, or multiple strings of redundancy, all of those kinds of things we thought about consciously as we saw those failures unfolding. So we really took benefit from those who tried ahead of us, right? But then we went through the mission, and we had a series. We had what we call a hot wash after the mission, which is this review of how did it go, and we’re self critical, not everything went great. So we generated a list of 65 items that we wanted to fix or make better between the missions. And so 10 of those went to IM2, and the other ones go to IM3, 4 and 5 subsequent like enhancements. But what did we essentially have to fix? We would fly this mission again, like I am one I am two could be exactly the same with one. Fix, fix the laser range finder and make sure that that would fire, and then we’d fly it again, because it flies beautifully. But how can we do it with more precision, more accuracy? Fix the laser range finders. Fix orbit determination and the ranging of where you are in space at any given time, those were the big things. And should we change the antenna configuration? Because we don’t want to bounce off the surface anymore. But we didn’t change it. We were going to land upright. That’s what we did. Make sure we’re going to land upright. So those were just some comments for you on kind of the kinds of things that we looked at, but that formal process of going through and understanding what really went wrong and what needs to be fixed now, because we have a schedule and a budget too, and not everything can be added in. You know, right away, some things take some time and some trade space and some understanding for the long term, because we’re building a program for the long term, we’re not building a one off mission. And so how can we put block upgrades into Nova C? How can we move to heavier cargo on Nova D with the reliability we’re looking at we’re wanting to achieve? Right? That’s kind of how we’re managing the program.
Sue Lederer
We have similar ideas with the payloads. With the first round of payloads, they did a really good job at thinking through what kinds of payloads could actually help them with the mission. So unlike future missions, the early ones, the vendors actually chose the payloads that NASA put forward as options. One of them was NDL, the navigation Doppler, LIDAR. So even though their lasers weren’t firing, we had a payload that was on board that still was able to collect the laser range finding data for us. So again, one of those teamwork where we could use our data to help them understand how the lander was landing. We had Lunar Node 1 which is an equivalent to a GPS type of communication system. And during the mission, when we needed to really get some help with navigating with the lander, I reached out to the LN1 lead the pi, and said, Hey, we need some help with some navigation. And he said, you know, off the cuff, just no pause at all. We’re navigation payload. We’re here to help you navigate, right? And so it’s that back and forth, really working together in in not just us, helping them, them helping us, and then taking some of the lessons learned. Our scouts payload was designed to look down and see the plume surface interaction from the engines turning up the dust on the surface. There was some redundancy we didn’t have. So it didn’t operate on the first mission we have it on the next mission that’s coming up, that’s actually in flight right now, the Firefly mission, so we’ve added some redundancies to that payload to ensure that they get the data that they need, so that we can really understand that to help us then use that data to ensure that we properly plan for how does the plume surface interaction tell us how we can better design our lunar landers and make sure that there’s safety for the astronauts when they’re landing as well. So it’s helping for a future lander, and it’s helping for future payload as well.
Steve Altemus
Yeah, one of the one of the interesting things about Lunar Node 1, the payload that helped us with our trajectory going out to the moon, we were having trouble with the accuracy of our orbit determination. Where are you as you get further and further to the moon, because the LN1 payload was active on the way out to the moon, they were actually sending their signals down through the Deep Space Network and not using our ground network that we developed commercially. And so when our commercial network was having some trouble. The Deep Space Network knew about us and was tracking us because of that LN1 payload, and therefore we could actually get access to the Deep Space Network to verify where we were in space when we needed it, because we hadn’t scheduled it. And that doesn’t work as real time as you’d like. It’s fully booked the Deep Space Network, and so fitting it in was as a result of flying an LN1 payload and having that send a signal back to the Deep Space Network to help us determine where we were
Sue Lederer
talking about the personal side. The PI had a baby who was a week or two old at the time, so he was up at kind of crazy hours. So I was calling him at three and four in the morning, and he was like, yep, that’s fine. I can jump in the car and go do what needs to be done to make sure that that we can help with this. So yeah, all of our P our payload team, they were really, really great.
Leah Cheshier
Wow, I am loving this and loving reliving IM1. It makes me more excited for I am two, so I let’s dive into it. Let’s talk about IM2, and this new mission coming up, the lander IM1 was a nova C lander. Is IM2, the same is that the same spacecraft as before? And can you break it down for us? Yes,
Steve Altemus
Yes, IM1,2,3, and 4 are the same lander. We’re building the same core systems over and over and over again to make sure that we can repeat, have repeatability and reliability and robustness in our transportation leg or delivery system to the moon. So at their core, they’re the same, but we’re carrying a significantly more aggressive manifest of payloads. This time on mission two. And so it’s a dynamic mission. There’s deployable payloads all over the lander. So we deploy a drill, the PRIME1 drill suite. It’s a trident drill. So we’ll talk about that down to the surface of the moon and drill in 10 centimeter increments down a meter deep and measure the volatiles that are off gassing out of the tailings pile, and see if there’s any trapped volatiles or water ice sublimating off of the tailings pile. Fascinating, but that’s more important than finding the water ice, because really we’re demonstrating the engineered systems that will help us prospect for materials and water ice in the future and in the Artemis campaign. So it’s really learning about the techniques of how to do it. Another one is an invention that Intuitive Machines came up, called the micronova, or Hopper, and it’s fascinating because it’s a mini lunar lander that flies off the side of the lander itself on a rail system. It’s rocket propelled, and it hops five times along the surface testing a communications system with Nokia Bell Labs, 4g LTE communications, the first cellular signals on the moon, or hop up to five times and then down into permanently shadowed region where we carry two international payloads. One is a pulley space Hungarian payload. That’s a neutron spectrometer. Another one is a pyrometer from Germany, DLR, and we’ll measure temperature and what the constituents are in the bottom of that permanently shadowed region. We’ll take pictures down there, and then we’ll hop back out, and so we’ll be the first time in an area of the moon that’s never seen sunlight and see sense what’s down in the bottom of that region. Another one, real quick before you jump in, Sue, is the lunar outpost rover for flying and deploying a rover deployment mechanism where the rover fall, uh. Um is released down in a garage, down to the surface, and a small rover drives out. And then we test this Nokia 4g, LTE, at shorter distance. So we can test both long distance communications on the surface and short distance communications, all of this precursor for sending deployed elements out while you’re astronauts and LTVs and space suits, you know, all those interconnections that have to communicate with each other. This is the precursor work for that so very fascinating mission, international payloads, Japanese rover that drops down to the surface from probably the engine deck area, and it’s, it’s about what, two meters off the surface, and then just drops down onto the surface. Two wheeled tail dragger that runs around a little bit. And then, so there’s two rovers, a drill, a hopper. All have to play nice together.
Leah Cheshier
Well, I want to keep talking about the payloads, but this is a lot of payloads. So can you give us an idea of how big the Nova C lander is?
Steve Altemus
Yeah, the Nova C lander, fully few fueled as we separate from the Falcon nine. Falcon 950, 500 we separate in a, what we call a trans lunar injection orbit, which is about 385,000 kilometers by 185 kilometers, highly elliptical orbit. We’re about 2100 kilograms fully fueled. That’s the weight, or the mass of the lander. Empty weight is about 900 kilograms. So we take about 1200 kilograms of liquid oxygen and liquid methane and helium to pressurize the system and then ignite and have the propellants drive us all the way out to the moon and and break us into orbit. The size, it stands about 14 feet high. It’s about eight feet in diameter. So it’s not a tiny lander. If you look at it, it’s it’s pretty big. It’s tall, cylindrical shaped, or hexagonal cylinder, with six landing gear on it and an engine bell for liquid oxygen, liquid methane. The expansion nozzle sits about about two feet. I’ll mix my units two feet from the surface when we touch down.
Leah Cheshier
Okay, so this is carrying every single payload that we’ve just discussed. And to get back to payloads, you mentioned PRIME1, and I know that’s a NASA payload, correct?
Sue Lederer
It is. So the payload that we have is it’s going to collect science, but it’s actually a Space Technology Mission Directorate, what we call STMD, because we love acronyms at NASA. So the goal of this is really to do some technology demonstrations also in order to collect science. So PRIME1 is a combination of two different payloads, and PRIME1 stands for the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment One. It’s going to have the Trident drill. Again, like Steve mentioned, it’s a meter. And for those of you who like football, and that’s about a yard every I think a lot of people understand yards, which is about three feet. So that’s going to drill into the surface. And then, and that’s called the the regolith ice drill for exploring new terrain. These ones I have to read off, because I don’t remember these off the top of my head, and then MSOLO is the mass spectrometer observing lunar observations. So mass spectrometer, what’s a mass spectrometer, what’s a volatile let me get back to some kind of basics. So a mass spectrometer is an instrument that really is sniffing things that are easily turning into gas, so things like oxygen coming from the tanks, or methane or water coming from below the surface, if there’s any ammonia or methane ice that they bring up, whatever happens to come up from the surface, as well as the different gasses that are potentially off gassed from the lander, as well As from the hopper, which reminds me, I just wanted to bring one little personal thing in, right? We talked about Odysseus, or Odie, being the first lander. The second lander is Athena, which we like to call Addie, so we have the female counterpart. And the thing that I love the most is the hopper is named after Grace Hopper. And Grace Hopper was this really ground brace breaking technical woman decades ago. So they like to call her Gracie. So it brings a little bit of the personal into it, and she’s such a little mini me of the the full lander that I’m really excited to see Gracie hopping around the surface.
Steve Altemus
If you say it fast. Grace Hopper. Grace Hopper sounds like grasshopper. The hopper is a hopper, and Gracie Hopper was great name for it and Athena or Addie. Well, Odysseus and Athena are in mythology. And so that was a natural progression, where. I guess they drilled in Zeus had a headache, and they drilled into Zeus head and released Athena. And so with the drill, the prime tried and drill on the prime wood payload. We thought it was important the fact that she was born out of Zeus head, by drilling into this head, that was part of the story.
Leah Cheshier
Oh as a comms person, I’m loving all of the thought into this. This is fantastic. So
Sue Lederer
back to PRIME1, right? So the original science goal, absolutely was to go to a more southerly location and be able to detect water, because the mission is launching a little bit later. We’re going to slightly different area, because that that place is now kind of in shadow, definitely in shadow. So it means that we’re focusing more on the technology demonstration side of things, as opposed to potentially it’s it’s a low likelihood it’s not, it’s not zero. Everybody looks at the models and says, We’re not going to find water. But my personal experience, at least, has been that when I’ve been told you’re definitely not going to find something, leave it to data to totally upturn a model on its head, and have to be able to make sure that the models actually follow what the data is telling you. So I very much appreciate that this technology demonstration will also help us to better understand the moon and improve our models, because in the future, we really are going to need to use the resources on the moon for a future base that the astronauts are going to go to. So this is this resource mining that we keep talking about, where we are going to be able to understand the technology demonstration of how does a drill work on the moon? How does a mass spectrometer on the moon work in the actual environment of the South Pole? You can do all the tests you want on the earth, but until you’re in the real environment with the sun raining radiation down on you, and the cold and the warmth fluctuating as the daytime goes by. You don’t really have a truly good understanding of how good your your technology works. So we will get that from the PRIME1 demonstration, being a technology demonstration. And then one additional payload that we also have on is the LRA, so that stands for lunar or, sorry, Laser Retro Reflector Array. And it’s another cute little payload. It fits in the palm of your hand. It looks like a little hemisphere. It has eight quarts, what we call cube corner reflectors, which is a very fancy way of saying that if you take a laser and you shine it, that laser light will bounce directly opposite, backwards to the source that sent the laser out. And the great thing about that is that it then allows us to very carefully pinpoint. We call them fiducial markers. That’s a fancy way of saying that we are getting a really precise location on the surface of the moon of exactly where the lander is located. So that in the future, when we have orbiting spacecraft and we have landers coming in, having these, these fiducial markers at the south pole will allow us to better navigate those landers to the surface of the moon. So it’s exciting to have a couple of very different kinds of payloads for us, one passive and one very, very active. With with the prime team.
Steve Altemus
This is really an interesting mission from another aspect. When we talked, I mentioned in the beginning the passion to build the lunar economy CLPS has the drill package and the laser reflector array, the other payloads were aggregated into a single mission by Intuitive Machines. And so we went to NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, STMD, and we coupled proposed with Nokia, the LTE payload, and we were awarded that through STMD. It wasn’t through CLPS that all that was put together. CLPS brought an anchor tenant, like the PRIME1 drill, but then we had to aggregate other payloads with a series of commercial, international, other NASA payloads and the CLPS payload. And so this really is the beginning of how the commercial economy can start to take off. I mentioned a payload from Hungary, a payload from Japan and a payload from Germany. There’s also commercial payload to do testing of data warehousing on the moon for disaster recovery. Like to store data centers there. So there’s edge computing kind of ideas. And so it’s there’s also Columbia, who flew on our first mission, Columbia Sportswear to test an insulating material. But there’s a sunshade, now that they’re flying, so an insulator and a sunshade that comes out of the garment industry that is appropriate as an insulator on the surface. So non traditional partnership. It’s just fascinating mission, and we’re able to do that primarily because of the success of mission one. And so I see this building and building where more opportunities to fly a Diverse set of payloads in partnership with NASA and others. You know that’s that’s what’s coming about here, as the lunar economy begins to blossom.
Sue Lederer
And this is the beginning right of the Artemis program. The Artemis program is much bigger than just CLPS. We have all the other pieces that ultimately lead to the astronauts landing on the moon. We need to make a sustainable economy in the future, a sustainable services on the lunar surface. These are the first pieces where we’re sending robotic missions down to help us understand the lunar surface, to understand the environment of the moon, and to understand how to live and work there, how to communicate back and forth, how to use the things that are on the moon for what we call in situ resource utilization, which is a mouthful to say. Can you go to the moon and be able to extract the water so that astronauts can have something to drink and oxygen to breathe and to create fuel, so that you don’t have to bring everything with you from the Earth to the Moon to really create a future dwelling on the moon. So it’s a really exciting thing that we are the starting point for understanding those things, so that in the future, Gateway and Artemis, and the other missions that we have as part of the full Artemis program, can really learn and grow from this base that we’re starting off with, with CLPS.
Leah Cheshier
I wanted to go back to something that you mentioned, Steve, some of the other commercial payloads that are flying or partners, I guess, with Columbia, with Nokia. These are names that people are probably familiar with. Are these part of NASA’s tipping point initiative? And can you tell us more about what that initiative is?
Steve Altemus
Well the NASA’s tipping point initiative is from the Space Technology Mission Directorate is to advance and do flight demonstrations or laboratory demonstrations on technologies that are promising for future space exploration. So there’s a whole suite of ideas that they choose from in certain swim lanes. Of you know, studying the environment, studying space weather, studying survive the night technology, nuclear space, all kinds of different subjects that NASA is interested in learning about different capabilities that they’re going to need. And The Tipping Point provides seed money to develop a payload, and some of them don’t ever make it out of the laboratory. Other ones get to flight demonstration. And so for Intuitive Machines, what was important were the flight demonstrations. So Nokia and Intuitive Machines teamed up to develop a space rated cellular communications radio and antenna system. And this is a time where the Space Technology Mission Director at STMD said, I want to see that fly, and so we’re flying that, and that’s amazing, and it’s going to become a baseline for communicating on the moon, if it proves out well, the drill was another idea. How do you drill into the surface of a planet, and the PRIME1 drill was a package STMD paid for other ones, like our hopper that we designed was the idea of scavenging from an existing lander, anything you could reuse on the surface in situ. Resource Utilization can also mean what’s there a lander. What parts of it could you reuse? And so we took the navigation pod, which has all the sensors to tell you where you are, and we said, what if we put a flight computer and a propulsion system on it and made it detachable, and out of it came Gracie Hopper, or the or the micronova or hopper. And so that’s where that came from. For an extreme mobility payload. How do you move further and further away from the lander, your initial landing spot? And can you hop on the moon? Can you go to extreme places beyond where you touch down? And you know, the hopper eventually has a capability of flying 25 kilometers away from the lander. So that’s that’s incredible. So all of these things were ideas that came out of stretching our minds. And the tipping point does that to think of the systems you’re going to need in the future to get to the moon in a sustainable way, to get to Mars and resolve those technology barriers.
Sue Lederer
Yeah, so the tipping point is one of those strange in between pieces on IM2 we, NASA, have put a lot of effort into making sure that the PRIME1 trident and M solo payload suite and the LRA are going to be flying to the moon. We have funded the development through this tipping point contract for the rover and the hopper. But the rover and the hopper are not managed by NASA. We are not the ones who are operating them either. So we operate trident. We operate M solo. They operate in. It’s there. We’re just giving them the funding and say, Go, you do everything. So it kind of then leads back to this concept where we talk about CLPS, but they are not CLPS missions. They are the vendor missions. We are one of the customers on their mission. It’s actually the Intuitive Machines mission that’s flying. But again, it comes back to this, this different way of doing business. And some of it is our payloads, some of it is their payload. Some of it is commercial payloads, international payloads, and some of it is NASA funding, helping them to develop new technologies as well. It’s a nice combination of many things.
Steve Altemus
Yes. It’s a way of the future,
Leah Cheshier
Yeah going together, Well, we’ve walked through Nova c, what it looks like, how big it is. We know now everybody that’s flying on board talking about the payloads. So let’s dive into the mission profile. Can you walk us through from launch to landing? What is this lander going to be doing? Okay,
Steve Altemus
so I talked about our launch from Kennedy Space Center launch pad A on a falcon SpaceX Falcon 950, 500 which will take about 3100 kilograms of payload into that orbit. That includes the lander. About 2100 kilograms is on the lander, including all the payloads and all the fuel. But in addition to that, we have ride share payloads that we’ve contracted with, and we put three payloads on the outside of what they call an ESPA ring, which is an embedded acronym, like only NASA can do the expended EELV, which is the expense expendable launch vehicles of the old days. So payload support, assembly, ring, ESPA ring, you can
Sue Lederer
remember that for the future.
Leah Cheshier
yeah, that’s easy
Steve Altemus
acronym, so I’m trying to remember but we fly a JPL Hyperspectral Imager satellite called the lunar Trailblazer. We contracted directly with Jet Propulsion Laboratory to fly that instrument and that satellite and deploy it from trans lunar injection orbit, which is the 385,000 kilometers by 185 kilometers and that that’ll separate after the lander separates from the booster itself. There’s another payload that’s going to an asteroid done by a company called Astro Forge, and they’re going to fly out towards an asteroid from that highly elliptical orbit that I talked about. And then a third payload separates, and that’s a payload called Epic, which will do a payload transfer demonstration in that for space exploration future from that. And so there’s things deploying all the way off when we’re out into this highly elliptical orbit, and then we’ll be on to the moon. We’ll take about seven days to transit from Earth to the Moon. And Intuitive Machine Lander, because it has a liquid oxygen, liquid methane, propulsion system has a highly energetic trajectory, which means we get out there very quickly, almost like the Apollo days. We don’t actually take advantage of the gravity assist to wind ourselves out there slowly. In 45 to 60 days, like some of the other landers are out there, we go more direct. We’ll then do three possibly trajectory control maneuvers to hone in and focus exactly our target point for lunar orbit insertion. That’s key, because when we hit that target, we actually get are in a good place to conduct that breaking burn. To take all that speed, the delta v, that we put in to get to the moon, we have to now reduce to zero as we land on the moon. So you have to do this serious breaking burn, slowing down and capturing in lunar orbit. And that’s 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers in circular orbit. And from there we’ll loiter till we process over our landing site. I’m using hand gestures on a podcast. That’s not healthy. So we’ll circulate the orbit and go round and round. We’ll then lower our altitude, called the deorbit insertion, till we get down to an altitude where we start our power descent. And that burn is over 13 minutes long to break and take that final delta V delta velocity out of the orbit and reduce it to one meter per second when we touch down. What’s interesting is power descent is done without any assist from the ground on the back side of the Moon. So we initiate the burn before, we don’t actually initiate the burn. We set it all up to burn, and this lander knows when to burn and ignites the engine when we can’t talk to it all by itself. And then we come down from 85 kilometers down to the surface. We take a measurement from our navigation cameras called terrain relative navigation, where we look at the craters going past, and we could determine our speed over the surface. And we could determine somewhat of our altitude based on the measurements that we’re getting, and we’ll come down, and as we descend, the last minute of flight is when we tip over and scan the landing site for hazards. And we can look for slopes that are less than 10 degrees and rocks that are smaller than a bowling ball, and we’ll pick out a landing field and land in that spot based on what the hazard detection and avoidance system tells us. That’s critical, because that’s where we actually need the laser altimeters as we tip over, collect, collect the landing site data, and then slowly, slowly throttle down to about one meter per second, and then touch down and fly right down into the moon, because we don’t want to hover, we don’t want to bounce, we want to just fly. And then when as soon as we touch down at one meter per second, the engine and the IMU, Inertial Measurement Unit, sense that we’re not descending anymore. We’re not descending, we’re not descending. And on a three count, it’ll keep throttling down and shut the engine off, and then we’re safely on the surface, and we wait for the signal, the heartbeat of the lander, to say, I’m alive. And that’s when the cheering starts.
Leah Cheshier
Well, how long does it take to get that signal?
Steve Altemus
Well last time you were in the conference room behind the control room and you could hear a pin drop as we waited for that carrier lock on the frequency, the S bend frequency, and it was some period of time, several minutes, where everybody was holding their breath, and then the release from the team, when we said, we’ve got a signal we’re on the surface, that was tremendous feeling. A lot of cheering goes up at that moment. Then the hard work of running the mission, once you’re there, begins conducting the surface operations.
Sue Lederer
Think there might be hard work in getting there too.
Leah Cheshier
Yeah, maybe.
Leah Cheshier
Well we’re about out of time, but really quickly, I wanted to ask both of you, what’s next after I am too, both for Intuitive Machines and for NASA.
Sue Lederer
So for NASA, we are launching for CLPS at a cadence at about two per year, and some of you may have seen the launch last week that Firefly had. So they are in orbit right now. They have a much longer transit period, so they are coming up on their landing March 2. So we’re we’re simultaneously working that mission with getting prepared for this mission as well. So that’s been a lot of fun, and let’s just throw some challenges. I think it’s been great for all of us to learn again from each other, right? It’s all about a team work of creating this lunar economy together. So those on the cadence of about two per year, is what we’re aiming for, kind of for the rest of this decade, and then we’ll see where Eclipse goes beyond that. But it’s been interesting that after, after these couple missions that are coming up, we have, IM3 coming up next.
Steve Altemus 57:46
Yes, for Intuitive Machines, you know, certainly we’re going to keep that regular cadence of missions going with IM3 coming in about a year later. So that annual cadence is what we aiming for. And on that mission begins, we deploy the first data relay satellite around the moon that begins a constellation of satellites around the moon. So not only are we putting in the delivery system, the landers, and we’re moving the landers through a regular cadence emissions to get to heavy cargo landers, so that we can do a logistics supply that’s where we’re headed, but we’ve added building from Mission one, that ground network of radio astronomy dishes around the world made us competitive, and we put in a bid to NASA to build out the near space network services, and so we won those awards to put in the data relay network around the moon and The Navigation scheme for how you’re going to navigate, essentially the lunar GPS. And then all the ground stations commercially provided to communicate full spectrum from the surface to data relay to the earth. And that’s extensible from, you know, X geo they call it beyond geosynchronous orbit, to the moon, and then from the moon out to 2 million kilometers. And so the first satellite goes up on mission three, and then the second one, second two go on mission four, and the last two go on mission five. So that’s what’s in plan, and that’s all part of laying in the infrastructure for a lunar economy
Sue Lederer
Which is going to be really helpful, not just for future CLPS, but also for future gateway and future Artemis missions as well.
Leah Cheshier
Well, it sounds like it’s gonna be pretty busy, so a lot to look forward to
Steve Altemus
Yes, very much
Leah Cheshier
but we are looking forward to IM2 right now. So thank you both so much. This has been a wealth of information that you’ve shared and really just thank you for coming and sharing your expertise with us. Today. We are cheering for Nova C, for Athena, I should say, and for the NASA payloads on board, that everything is smooth and successful, and I just can’t wait to see what we learned this time. So thank you both.
Steve Altemus
Thank you very much. And one thing I’d add is ADDIE is currently in its shipping cradle, in its shipping container, waiting for the bridges in Louisiana to. Thaw out from our big snowstorm and ready to ship. So we’re ready to go to the Cape. And it was supposed to be this morning, but the bridge is iced over, so we’ll wait to get her safely tucked in at the Cape. We’ll wait another day.
Leah Cheshier
Can’t wait to see the arrival.
Sue Lederer
Yep, should be a lot of fun. So excited to be able to work these missions, and really excited to be able to work with IM and on IM2. It’s gonna be great,
Leah Cheshier
Fascinating thank you both again.
Steve Altemus
Thank you.
Sue Lederer
Thank you
Leah Cheshier
Thanks for sticking around, and I hope you learned something new today.
Check nasa.gov for the latest news, and find out more about commercial lunar payload services at nasa.gov/CLPS. If you’d like to learn more about why NASA CLPS and Intuitive Machines are targeting the lunar South Pole and the technology it takes to survive there, check out our sister podcast, Curious Universe. They released an episode in January that’s a deep dive. You can find them and all of our episodes at nasa.gov/podcasts.
You can follow Johnson Space Center on Facebook, X and Instagram. Use #AskNASA on your favorite platform to submit your idea and make sure to mention it for Houston, we have a podcast.
This episode was recorded January, 23 2025 thanks to Will Flato, Daniel Tohill, Dane Turner, Courtney Beasley, Dominique Crespo, Nilufar Ramji and Natalia Riusech And of course, thanks again to Sue and Steve for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on, and tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week.