Editor's note: Months after this article was first published, Intuitive Machines' Nova-C IM-1 mission slipped to 2022, because of a launch schedule change by partner SpaceX. Moon lander rival Astrobotic's Peregrine Mission 1 also slipped to 2022. These things happen with space missions, and this is still a great story. Read on.
Fueled by friendly competition, led by ambitious space pros and backed by the checkbook of the United States government, a fledgling Moon industry is starting to form. The next phase of space development is finally here. Humans are about to settle another world.
NASA hopes to return people to the Moon by the middle of the decade; this time to stay. And a new crop of private space companies is poised to play an enormous role in support. Aerospace innovator Intuitive Machines is gobbling up Moon contracts as fast as any of them and is quickly booking payloads for its Nova-C lunar landers. The seven-year-old Houston-based space company now finds itself smack at the front of the pack in the latest race to the surface of the Moon.
"We were not actually founded as a company to do lunar missions. We were founded as a company to take aerospace technologies and apply them to other industries. But, what happened was, we ended up hiring a bunch of people who were in the space industry. And you can't take the space out of space people," said Trent Martin, VP of aerospace services at Intuitive Machines on a recent Zoom call with Outerspaceland. So, when Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract opportunities came along to support NASA's Artemis program, solving the challenge of lunar landing was too tempting.
And it is a challenge. Despite public perception, landing on a frozen rock hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth is still really hard. Two lunar landers, one out of India and the other from Israel, crashed as recently as 2019. No commercial company has ever done it. Intuitive Machines hopes to succeed at the feat twice in the span of about 15 months. The Texas company has already earned two CLPS contracts to deliver shipments for Artemis, one in 2021 and the other right around the end of 2022.
Intuitive Machines is one of two companies sending landers to the Moon in late 2021. Nova-C is scheduled to launch in October on a SpaceX Falcon 9 to Schroter's Valley (Vallis Schröteri) in the western part of the Moon's near side after rival Astrobotic sends its Peregrine up on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan Centaur to the Northeast. If successful, they'll be the first two commercial companies to land anywhere on the Moon.
"It makes the next few years really, really exciting." If humans are going to settle the Moon, we have to be able to consistently and reliably land precisely at the location we want to land. The CLPS missions carry the vanguard of the landers tasked with proving that out. They are critical precursor missions to larger robotic and human landing missions for Artemis, Martin said.
With, on average, 20 to 30 years of experience in the aerospace industry, the space people at Intuitive Machines are setting up a robust delivery apparatus that could support as many as two lander missions to the Moon each and every year. The company already has the capacity to build two spacecraft at the same time at its Houston headquarters. It has its own mission control run by a former head at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC). And that mission control uses its own Lunar Telemetry Network (LTN) of ground stations all over the world to communicate with mission spacecraft. LTN is Intuitive Machines' commercial alternative to the crowded government-run Deep Space Network (DSN), Martin said.
Once fully set up, Intuitive Machines wants to have a fleet of landers to support Moon missions of all sizes. Nova-C, its smallest lander, will handle the company's first two CLPS missions. The "C" stands for "100", as in kilograms to the surface of the Moon, Martin explained. The medium-sized Nova-D (500 kg) and large Nova-M (1,000 kg) landers are currently being developed. Larger landers could come later, depending on market demand, he said.
Despite not starting out as a lunar landing company, and despite offering some products and services that don't have anything to do with outer space, Intuitive Machine's near-term plans are clear. Execute consistent, precise landings for anyone who wants to go to the Moon.
"Yeah, our mantra, by the way, is 'Stick the landing,'" Martin said.
"The advantage that we have, flying these commercial missions, is that you can do things that you wouldn't have been able to do if you were government only," Martin said.
IM-1, Intuitive Machines' first CLPS mission, will carry plenty of government science. Martin said there are six NASA payloads onboard. But it's a space camera and a pair of RC racers riding along as commercial cargo that could become the stars of this first Moon trip. IM-1 is a mission that has become as much about capturing hearts and minds as it is about scooping up Moon rocks.
Sometime after lunar touchdown, Nova-C will release two remote-controlled racing Moon rovers, finally ushering in the inevitable era of Moon motorsports and off-world entertainment humanity has been waiting for. The rovers, controlled by two competing teams of high schoolers back on Earth, will kick dust around a Moon track with cameras set up to capture all of the action for race fans back on Earth.
The "first ever race on the Moon" will be the grand finale in a series of student competitions that IM-1 payload partner Moon Mark dreamed up for the promotion of STEAM education. Six teams of high school students selected from around the world will compete in a series of qualifying rounds on Earth for the right to race rovers on the Moon, according to Moon Mark's website. The qualifying challenges include drone and autonomous vehicle racing, e-gaming, and a space-entrepreneur contest, according to a joint press release with Intuitive Machines earlier this year.
The finalist teams will help develop the racing rovers, which will be built by Moon mobility experts at Lunar Outpost. Each rover will be a smaller version of Lunar Outpost's Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) rover, tweaked to make it race ready, Julian Cyrus, chief operating officer at Lunar Outpost told Outerspaceland.
Even though it's a bit of a novelty compared to other projects onboard IM-1, the Moon race could pay big dividends down the line at a very important time for the space industry.
"One of the things that the aerospace community suffers from is that we tend to look around and talk to ourselves about how cool the things are that we are working on," Martin said. Fun projects like Moon races open aerospace up to people who might not have otherwise been exposed. That's especially crucial for recruitment of the aerospace engineers of the future. "I think it's important to get students involved early. If you can catch them in their middle school years, then you'll have a good supply of engineers 10 years later that are coming into the industry and ready to do exciting things."
Those same kids just might grow up to become the first true settlers of our solar system. Another project riding with the racing rovers on IM-1 wants to snap a photo that could come to define this exciting new age of human exploration.
Hawaii's International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA) plans to send a special camera to capture the very first image of the center of our galaxy from the Moon. It's the precursor to a more ambitious future project to establish a lunar observatory at the Moon's south pole to not only gaze out into space, but also to keep tabs on all of the activity on and around the Moon in the coming years. ILOA, a subsidiary of Space Age Publishing, is partnering with Canadian company Canadensys Aerospace to develop the equipment for its projects.
Hopefully, the image captured by the camera on IM-1 will pick up some of the Nova-C spacecraft, a bit of the lunar surface and then as sharp and as big of an image as possible of the center of the Milky Way, said Steve Durst, director at ILOA, talking with Outerspaceland about the precursor mission from his office in Hawaii.
Such an image could become iconic, like the famous "Earth-rise" image from Apollo 8 when humans first orbited the Moon in the middle of the 20th Century, Durst said. Through that photo, humanity collectively reflected on an entire history of a small blue planet and the remarkable achievement of its inhabitants reaching another world.
Now, at the beginning of the 21st Century, humans are finally returning to the Moon with high hopes of becoming a true space-faring civilization. The first image of the rest of the galaxy from the Moon points to where we are going instead of looking back at where we came from, Durst said. "When we return to the Moon in the 21st Century, we look out at our future."
If IM-1 is awe and entertainment and imagining the amazing future to come, Intuitive Machine's second Moon mission (IM-2), gets right down to the gritty business of actually making it all happen. A second Nova-C lander will travel to the Moon's south pole as soon as late 2022, where there will be plenty of action in the years that follow because of tantalizing indications of large stores of water ice there.
The Nova-C for IM-2 will arrive at the south pole armed with NASA's PRIME-1 drill and mass spectrometer. The agency wants to test its water ice detecting and extracting equipment before its VIPER Moon rover mission to the lunar south pole on Astrobotic's Griffin lander in 2023.
IM-2 will also send up a rover carrying a 4G-LTE system from Nokia. Nokia was tasked with setting up the first high-speed communications system on the Moon, which will be critical for real-time navigation of remote rovers and eventually sending the crystal clear pictures from what NASA hopes will be a bustling Moon base by the end of the decade.
Finally, Intuitive Machines has a very special vehicle of its own it wants to test out. The Micro-Nova, or "Hopper" as it is affectionately called by its creators, is a little machine that has two big jobs. First, and perhaps most importantly, it's one of the navigation pods riding on top of Nova-C to help the larger vehicle touch down safely. Once Nova-C settles on the surface of the Moon, the Hopper will detach from the main lander and explore the local lunar landscape on its own, Martin explained.
Engineers at Intuitive Machines believe their Hopper could be an option for exploring especially hard to reach places, like the inside of deep craters with sheer walls; places out of reach for even the most rugged rover. The Hopper could also hover around just above the surface to survey large areas of the lunar landscape up close, Martin said.
The south pole is the perfect place to test the new vehicle. It's a very unique place on the Moon, pocked with craters and mountains and boulders that make it difficult to find places to land. And where you want to land your main lander - a sun-lit place for power with a view of Earth for communication - isn't where resources like water ice are typically going to be. Water ice will be mostly in dark craters and places like that, Martin said.
A Hopper could be an important part of extending the range for upcoming missions that will be scouring the south pole for lunar resources. The Hopper on IM-2 will only have a range of a few kilometers, but future, larger versions, that can carry more fuel, could travel as far as 30 kilometers from the main landing site, he said.
"So, we will have a Hopper, a rover and a drill on that IM-2 mission. It is shaping up to be an extremely valuable in-situ resource utilization mission," Martin said.
The Moon is the main focus for Intuitive Machines for the foreseeable future. CLPS missions are keeping the company busy and cislunar space is just an intriguing place to be right now, Martin said. But it's in the company's DNA to innovate and build a bit beyond the primary mission of the day.
"We always are thinking about what is the next thing and how can this technology apply to that next thing," he said.
With an eye on future needs, the company decided to develop its own liquid oxygen liquid methane (LOX/Methane) propulsion system for its Nova-C landers instead of using more standard parts. Methane was a practical choice, Martin admitted, because it can be acquired easily in Houston and can be handled safely in shirt sleeves during testing, but a LOX/Methane engine hasn't been used yet in space, so it's a risk. Methane is apparently readily available on Mars, though, and LOX/Methane could very well be the space fuel of the future, so engineers decided it was worth their time to develop the technology for Nova-C and other landers, he said.
"By us developing that technology now and proving that it works in space, we can create, we like to call it the Conestoga Wagon of space transportation. If I can make something that's reliable and simple, easy to work on and no matter what that engine's gonna fire, then, no matter where I'm at, as long as I can get methane, I've got an engine. I'm ready to go," Martin said.
It's like that for navigation on Nova-C too. Engineers at Intuitive Machines recognized vision-based navigation is the future for space missions, so they started developing their own Vision Processing Unit (VPU) and software for precision landing and hazard avoidance. Then, they went a step further, deciding to share their technology with the rest of the space industry. The so-called "ThinVPU" toolkit helped earn Intuitive Machines an additional $1.3 million Tipping Point contract from NASA.
"Vision-based navigation is increasingly a part of space missions ranging from precision landing to surface mobility to rendezvous and docking," said Intuitive Machines co-founder, Dr. Tim Crain in a February 2020 press release. "We feel that making the hardware and software toolkit of the ThinVPU available to the community will both enhance the robustness of our vision navigation system and lower the overall cost of developing and testing this capability across the industry."
Martin explained the thinking behind ThinVPU in more detail for Outerspaceland. Not surprising, the vision goes well beyond vision processing.
A lot of space hardware is "off-the-shelf" now. Credit goes to Apollo era engineers for creating a huge catalogue of parts to pull from. That has already significantly reduced the time and costs for developing hardware for space vehicles like Nova-C. The art, now, is piecing those parts together and figuring how to get them to talk with one another. Software development takes up an increasing share of the time it takes to develop spacecraft, Martin said.
Meanwhile, open-source code-sharing repositories have been commonplace in the computer gaming industry for some time now and innovation in that industry has absolutely soared. With common code to pull from for the basic framework of their games, developers can focus on pushing the envelope instead of reinventing what has already been done. ThinVPU could be the start of such a software repository for the space industry, Martin said.
Everyone docking in space or landing in a faraway place will need some kind of vision processing. And there's common code that everyone has to develop to link the cameras to onboard computers to make that happen, Martin said.
"Why do we all recreate that software every single time? Let's not do that," Martin said. "Instead, let's make it available in an open-source format that says, 'Here's the computer. Here's this camera. We created a piece of code that links the two. Now, we encourage you, if you have a different camera or a different processor, put 'em in here. Put your code in.' And then we can all, 10 years from now go to this database and go, 'I want this camera with this computer. Boom! I have the code.'"
Naturally, not everything will be shared. There would still be proprietary software. But, the really basic code that everyone needs to get started, should be readily available, he said. Such a software repository can only accelerate advancement in space technology.
Historically, aerospace companies have held everything close to the vest, Martin said. "But we think we can change the industry like the gaming industry has done."
The space industry has already changed significantly in the decade that gave rise to Intuitive Machines. And one of the biggest changes in the industry is the way NASA goes about its business. CLPS and programs like it represent a new model for the public-private partnership still needed to make things happen in outer space. It's a model where NASA is more super-smart customer than all-knowing operator.
Here, it's private industry that owns the spacecraft and NASA hitches a ride when it needs to do important space science. The model has already resulted in big cost-saving wins for NASA in transporting astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station via Dragon capsules from SpaceX.
With government loosening its grip on the process, new space companies have started to do development their own way for their own spacecraft concepts, often choosing to "fail" fast with imperfect prototypes in order to harvest key data to quickly get to the next step in development and then to the next. A dramatic demonstration of this strategy in action just happened.
Hundreds of thousands of curious onlookers tuned in on the internet for the testflight of Starship Serial Number 8 (SN8) this December. During the test, SN8, a full-size prototype for the upper stage of Elon Musk's future Mars transport vehicle, successfully executed a never-done-before bellyflop re-entry maneuver, but the huge ship couldn't quite stick its landing. Even though SN8 was destroyed in a fantastic fireball on the landing pad in Boca Chica, TX, its demise was fully expected. Twin prototype Serial Number 9 (SN9) was already assembled and awaiting its turn in a nearby hangar.
Traditional aerospace would spend a lot of time trying to get requirements just right before building any hardware, Martin said. "We'll often build with a half a set of requirements."
Intuitive Machines engineers have already done hundreds of tests on the LOX/Methane engine for Nova-C based on only rudimentary requirements for prototypes and the final flight-ready version of the engine will be much better for it, Martin said. It's what gives him confidence that it will deliver Nova-C and its CLPS payload to the Moon on the very first try.
"I love this model. I worked for the government for a long time, and I've never seen a model like this. It's amazing how fast they move on the CLPS side," Martin said. "If the government continues down that path, what they're gonna find is that they have a reliable marketplace to go buy services to the Moon."
Adam created Outerspaceland to tell the stories of dreamers and to live through all of the brilliant people who push the boundaries of everything that's possible. Contact him at outerspacelander@gmail.com or @Ospaceland on Twitter.