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Author: Lin Feng

Editor丨Hai Yao

Image source: Midjourney

In February 2024, the Nova-C lander manufactured by Intuitive Machines, carrying SpaceX's Falcon 9, landed in the near-lunar south pole region (80.13 degrees south latitude, 1.44 degrees east longitude), successfully landing on the lunar surface.

This is the first lunar landing mission completed by a private company in human history, creating another milestone in commercial spaceflight.

NASA, which returned to the moon for the first time in half a century, paid only $118 million for the moon landing.

Image source: lroc, the arrow indicates the Nova-C lander

Intuitive Machines was founded in 2013 and went public in 2023. Its main businesses include lunar landing services, orbital services, lunar data, space products and infrastructure.

In May, the company confirmed that it would upgrade Nova-C before carrying out its second mission at the end of this year. Intuitive Machines will also plan to carry out two lunar lander missions this year.

This moon landing is the first "soft landing" of NASA's Artemis moon landing program. NASA plans to achieve a manned landing on Artemis3, jointly build the Lunar Gateway space station with Europe, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and Canada, and have Artemis4 astronauts go to the lunar space station to activate the computer system.

The lander is a hexagonal column, 4 meters high and 1.67 meters wide. It weighs about 1,900 kilograms when fully loaded with propellant and carries a payload of about 130 kilograms. The original 7-10-day plan was shortened because it rolled over when it landed.

On March 23, Intuitive Machines announced that Odysseus had been permanently put into hibernation.

On July 10, NASA announced that Intuitive Machines and three other companies would participate in the feasibility study of the manned lunar rover (LTV) for the Artemis lunar mission.

Image credit: NASA, Intuitive Machines lander

1. Commercial spaceflight opens the door to the moon

The first successful landing of a lander by a private company on the moon went down in history. As the first commercial aerospace company to open the lunar door, Intuitive Machines instantly became the focus. According to the financial report, Intuitive Machines' stock price soared in early January, with an increase of more than 3 times.

Through the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program, IM-1 carried six NASA payloads, including Doppler laser radar, cameras for studying landers, fuel gauges and other technical equipment. There were also six non-NASA payloads, including Columbia's jacket materials, artist Jeff Koons' "Moon Phases" work, and the Lunar Observation Association's astronomical camera.

Image source: YouTube, IM-1 commercial payload

Intuitive Machines generated record revenue of $73.1 million in the first quarter of 2024, equal to its total revenue in 2021, and gross profit of $12.2 million, primarily due to the NASA OMES III engineering services contract and commercial payments from customers for the IM-1 mission.

Landing on the moon is an extremely precise project. Manned lunar landing is the highest achievement of human industry at present. The scientific and strategic significance of lunar exploration is innumerable.

In recent years, private space companies have been proposing lower-cost lunar landing plans. But at least before IM-1, there have been three failed attempts by commercial companies to explore the moon.

According to Space News, in April 2019, Beresheet, built by Israel Aerospace Industries, crashed while landing on the lunar surface; in April last year, Japan's ispace lander HAKUTO-R M1 crashed during its final approach to the moon.

Earlier this year, Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander was launched, marking the first time a U.S. private company has challenged a lunar landing mission. However, a failure in the Peregrine's propulsion system caused a critical fuel leak, making it difficult to complete the soft landing mission. The mission failure dampened the confidence of the United States in its first attempt to land on the moon in 52 years.

Landing maneuvers are a truly difficult step. After the Apollo spacecraft entered the 10-second "death zone" in the last 3 minutes before landing, it also encountered the challenge of avoiding obstacles and boulders. The journey to the moon is long and demanding, and the probe requires high precision. Not long ago, my country's Chang'e 6 successfully landed on the back of the moon after 24 days of orbiting the moon. In short, it is necessary to complete the Earth-Moon transfer orbit flight, the circular orbit flight around the moon, and the elliptical orbit flight, and gradually eliminate the orbital surface data residuals before landing on the moon. Just completing the small step of landing makes people sweat.

Image source: Intuitive Machines, the moon photographed before the lander descended

To achieve a soft landing in a small pre-selected landing area with complex terrain, the highest precision calculations must be made during the separation of the assembly (orbiter, lander, etc.), thrust ignition, deceleration and descent, hovering flight, and contact with the lunar surface. This is truly a case of "a slight error leads to a huge mistake."

It is reported that Intuitive Machines used a landing method very similar to that of Apollo.

Tim Crain, chief technology officer of Intuitive Machines, explained that they basically rely on inertial measurement units (IMUs) and optical navigation data stream algorithms to land. When actually landing, the lander descends quickly. "We hit it even harder, and we skidded a bit along the way. The last impact caused at least one bracket to break."

This serious technical failure means that the lander will misjudge its own position and attitude. Previously, the Apollo spacecraft was able to avoid obstacles only after emergency intervention by astronauts. What about the unmanned Odysseus?

At this point, the payload on the lander was urgently "validated". Flight engineers installed a software patch to connect Odysseus to the ship's Doppler lidar, which sends and receives laser pulses to determine the speed and distance of the aircraft. It can be said that this commercial payload brought Odysseus back from the brink of death.

Image source: Intuitive Machines, photo of the Nova-C lander entering lunar orbit to perform the IM-1 mission

When Intuitive Machines announced its successful landing, its stock price soared 40%. The news of its "lame landing" caused it to plummet 30%. It was as thrilling as a roller coaster ride.

Although their Odysseus's difficult landing caused the spacecraft to almost flip over, with one of its six legs stuck and leaning against a rock, it achieved the two major goals of "safe and soft landing on the lunar surface" and "returning scientific and commercial data to customers." Steve Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, said, "Achieving both goals is an absolute success for us."

They said in a public post that IM's landing site was farther south than any other spacecraft soft-landing site in the world, less than a mile from the planned Malapert A landing area, which is also the area NASA is targeting for manned missions.

The Malapert A crater has preliminary conditions for Antarctic scientific research, and the IM-1 landing point is about 300 kilometers away from the lunar South Pole (above 86° south latitude). Water has been confirmed to exist at the lunar South Pole, and the possibility of developing polar water ice resources is of great significance.

Intuitive Machines noted that their IM-2 mission is ambitious, planning to drill for water ice on the moon and to deploy a data relay satellite on the moon for the first time.

Image source: Internet, IM-1 to IM-3

According to the evaluation of the IM-1 mission performance, Steve Altemus said that they will make "technical adjustments" to the communication and orbit determination of the lander, and will launch the second lander mission IM-2 in the fourth quarter of 2024. Including IM-3, all of them will be carried out with NASA as the main customer in accordance with the CLPS plan. In order to fill the mission gap after the third launch, Intuitive Machines plans to launch a fully commercial mission.

2. NASA orders provide long-term income security

In the risk statement of its 2021 financial report, Intuitive Machines stated: "We are a blank check company with no operating history and no revenue, and you have no basis to assess our ability to achieve our business objectives."

Image source: Intuitive Machines

Intuitive Machines had considerable revenue in the first quarter of 2024. Although it still faced a net loss of US$5.4 million, it had US$55.2 million in cash.

Intuitive Machines has government contracts that guarantee its long-term commercial revenue. It is a major participant in NASA's Lunar Payload Commercial Services Program (total $2.6 billion), has received a total of $233 million from the CLPS program, and is waiting for another CP-22 program.

A few months ago, it won NASA's MSR (Mars Sample Return Mission, $11 billion) technical support contract, and recently it received a research contract for the LTV lunar rover project (total value of $4.6 billion).

The products and services covered by their contract are provided by four business units: Lunar Access Services, Orbital Services, Lunar Data Services, and Space Products and Infrastructure, and they aim to support robotic and human exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Lunar access services are to use lunar landers like Nova-C to carry payloads of government and commercial customers to the moon. Closely related to it is the "Lunar Data Service", which provides lunar communications, navigation and imaging services through six ground stations and the planned lunar orbit satellite constellation. Currently, they have deployed the Lunar Data Network (LDN) and the Nova Control lunar operations center.

The contract value of their lunar access services business through the end of 2023 includes nearly $300 million for the CLPS and Tipping Point contracts, $25.1 million for commercial payloads and rideshare for IM-1 through IM-3, and even $1.6 million for commercial sponsorships and advertising.

In addition, their lunar orbit services provide ride-sharing, space domain awareness, fuel replenishment, orbital debris removal, space station services, satellite repositioning and other projects, which are the next 10 billion track for commercial aerospace. Infrastructure services are to develop propulsion systems, navigation systems, engineering services, lunar surface movement, etc. for the above tasks.

Among them, Intuitive Machines will invest in Earth-Moon Orbit Services in 2023. They stated in their financial report that the two business units of lunar services and Earth orbit services are in the main potential market, and the accessible market in the next 10 years is about 120 billion US dollars. Behind this is the OMESIII contract worth 720 million US dollars awarded by NASA, and they will be mainly responsible for NASA Landsat service missions.

NASA recently announced the cancellation of the Volatile Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission, which had cost $450 million to develop, due to additional testing and cost increases. The actual search for lunar water ice is likely to be conducted by the Lunar Polar Exploration (LUPEX) project of Japan and India.

Although this does not directly involve Intuitive Machines' lunar rover project, it is not difficult to see that their business relies heavily on contracts with NASA and customers. Failure to fulfill contractual obligations will have an adverse impact on their financial condition and operating results.

Image source: NASA, the terminated VIPER mission

Two of the company's three founders are senior NASA employees. Steve Labbe, chief engineer of NASA's Gateway program, is its VP. The core members also include long-time practitioners from NASA, the U.S. Air Force, KBR, and Boeing, ensuring its technical capabilities and operational strength.

Co-founder and CEO Steve Altmus graduated from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University and holds a master's degree in engineering management from the University of Central Florida. He is the deputy director of NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC), which oversees NASA's manned space program. He has worked at NASA for more than 20 years and served as the reconstruction director after the Columbia space shuttle disaster.

Image credit: Intuitive Machines, Steve Altmus

"We anticipate this will create an incredibly strong competitive position for the company in just a few years and become fundamental to American space exploration and a national asset," he said, describing the company's vision ahead of the IM-1 mission.

Another co-founder is Tim Crain, who also worked at NASA Johnson Space Center. He holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and is the head of flight dynamics for NASA's Morpheus program. Previously, they tried to build a ground version of the lunar lander in the plan, using a low-cost project development model. The results of this plan were also the main motivation for Tim and his colleagues to co-found Intuitive Machines.

Image credit: Intuitive Machines, Tim Crain

There is also a "space entrepreneur" Kam Ghaffarian, who is active in the fields of new energy and aerospace industries. He has worked for Lockheed Martin, Ford, and Loral, and is the co-founder of well-known companies such as IBX, Intuitive Machines, X-energy, Axiom Space, and SGT. The commercial companies he founded have more or less promoted the innovative development of the space economy. Among them, SGT is NASA's second largest engineering service contractor, providing international space station operations and astronaut training services, with an annual income of over US$500 million; Axiom Space has cooperated with SpaceX to complete private astronaut launch missions and sent them to the international space station.

Image credit: Intuitive Machines, Kam Ghaffarian

Kam believes that companies such as SpaceX have set a good example. "Our goal is to create a prosperous business ecosystem for space. The space industry still has long-term and huge growth opportunities."

The prerequisite that makes Kam so confident is the stability and mutual benefit of the cooperation between official agencies such as NASA and commercial aerospace companies.

"In terms of technological achievements, the level achieved by this mission (IM-1) is not worthy of such great attention. This mission reflects the development of the US aviation industry chain, especially the support for start-ups, which is more worthy of attention," said Jin Zhonghe, director of the Microsatellite Research Center of Zhejiang University.

According to data, since reaching 4% of total U.S. federal spending during the Apollo program in the 1970s, funding has dropped significantly with the number of missions completed. Within the statistical range, it has fallen to 0.48% of the total budget by 2020, and has remained stable at around 0.5% for nearly a decade.

Source: Researchgate, the orange line represents the change in NASA's budget from 1959 to 2021, and the blue bar chart represents the number of deep space missions successfully launched by the United States

Under limited budgets, NASA's spacecraft cooperation with private enterprises can be traced back to the early 21st century. In 2014, NASA launched the Tipping Point program to "incubate" small and medium-sized enterprises.

By allowing more commercial companies to participate in the space program, on the one hand, commercial aerospace companies can use this to conduct research and development, experiments, advertising, and even receive tourists. On the other hand, NASA can buy services from private companies, provide development resources, and obtain the technology it wants to use. "Take satellites as an example. The involvement of commercial aerospace has really made satellites take off. They send satellites into space, the cost is much lower, and the uses are increased a lot." Jeff DeWit, former chief financial officer of NASA, believes that NASA is copying this model and increasing it year by year.

Although the problem of returning astronauts home for Boeing's Starliner caused NASA a headache at the end of July this year, in terms of manned transportation, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft directly saved NASA $20-30 billion in research and development funds compared to Boeing's Starliner.

The same is true for the United States' moon landing. In September 2018, NASA launched the CLPS program, which funded a series of private companies to develop lunar landers. Intuitive Machines, Blue Origin and other 14 companies participated. Despite the failure of the "Peregrine Falcon", several companies are still preparing to launch. Judging from the contract price, the cost advantage of the CLPS program is obvious.

Intuitive Machines' 2023 financial report shows that the deployment of lunar data relay satellites will further enhance the Lunar Data Network (LDN) to provide continuous lunar coverage.

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