Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus on Making Moon Landing History and the Future of Private Space Travel

Nobody would want to get famous the way Steve Altemus got famous. It was in 2003 that Altemus’s name first became widely known, back when he was working for NASA in the human spaceflight division. On Feb. 1 of that year, the space agency was shaken to its roots, after the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry, claiming the lives of its seven-person crew. Altemus was put in charge of the forensic examination following the tragedy, assembling the 85,000 pieces of Columbia debris to help determine the cause of the accident. He did his job well—so well that the surviving three shuttles were able to fly without incident for eight and a half more years before their retirement in the summer of 2011.

Two years after the last shuttle flew, Altemus left NASA and co-founded Intuitive Machines, a pocket-sized aerospace company of fewer than 400 people, headquartered in Houston, Texas. The small outfit, which is one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies of 2024, has big dreams, however—nothing short of working to establish a new lunar economy. The job involves building and flying scientific and communications spacecraft on and around the moon, most notably in cooperation with NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to have astronauts back on the lunar surface before the end of the decade.

On Feb. 22 of this year, Intuitive Machines scored a huge win—becoming the first private company to soft-land a spacecraft on the moon, a feat previously achieved only by the space agencies of the U.S., the former Soviet Union, China, India, and Japan. The spacecraft, named Odysseus, touched down near the south lunar pole, a region rich in deposits of water ice, which could be used by future crews for breathable oxygen, rocket fuel, and drinking water. Odysseus lived for just under a month before its power systems winked out. But Intuitive Machines has plenty of other missions pending, working not just with NASA, but with the private sector to build communications satellites, enable resource harvesting, provide surface transportation, and deploy scientific research instruments.

In a conversation with TIME in April, condensed and edited for clarity, Altemus talked about the literally otherworldly future of his company—and of humanity writ large.

You made history with the Odysseus landing. Tell us a little bit about the mission and where you think it stands in the arc of space exploration.

We launched on February 15, spent about a week in transit, landed on the 22nd and executed our full mission as planned. What's amazing about that is to be able to do this on the first try and be successful. It’s unprecedented. We didn't do that in Apollo. The Russians didn't do that. Nobody's done that. What's even more impactful and what I think the legacy of the company will be is more than landing on the moon, but creating that economy around the moon.

Part of Intuitive Machines’ remit is to provide lunar transportation services for the private sector, but your biggest customer currently is NASA. How did you and the space agency initially connect?

For the first five years of the company, we were bouncing around in the single digit millions in revenue. ​​Our original mission was to use human spaceflight engineering skills and methodologies to solve problems in the industries here in Houston, which are oil and gas, healthcare, and aerospace. It wasn't until 2018 that the National Security Council said the moon is in our strategic interests, because of the geopolitical tensions with China. We then pivoted the entire company, to going back to the moon. That same year, we got an anchor contract with NASA for $2.6 billion over ten years.

What missions will you be flying under that arrangement?

In addition to Odysseus, we have two other spacecraft coming up that are replicas of Odysseus, but carry a different complement of deployable payloads. We also expect the award of a bigger contract at the end of May to put a constellation of six satellites around the moon to provide communications and navigation for the Artemis program. Those satellites will also allow us to sell navigation and communication services to and from the moon for any user globally.

Communications infrastructure around the moon requires similar infrastructure on Earth to connect with the satellites and process data. How does that part of the system function?

We’ve established the only lunar distance communications network around the world, in over 12 countries. We use underutilized radio astronomy dishes in the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, the United States—in both Kentucky and California—and elsewhere.

You also secured a major deal recently when you won another NASA contract to build the 21st century version of the Apollo era’s lunar rover, which astronauts used to travel extended distances on the missions of Apollo 15, 16, and 17. That could be an impressive piece of hardware.

Yes, our rover is about 1.5 metric tons, which is about the size of an F-150 pickup truck. It will be able to provide extreme mobility to astronauts. It's also self-driving so that when the astronauts are not there, we can use it commercially to do scientific and discovery work. We can search for water ice or for rare minerals or metals. Put those pieces together and we not only can fly to the moon, but communicate, navigate, and actually move out from location. We're the only company in the world that is doing these pieces like this in this way.

And yet you’re a small company competing with legacy operations like Boeing, or with giant upstarts like SpaceX. How do you stay in that game?

Our goal is to be a tier-one aerospace company, but do things differently. Most of the tier one aerospace companies came up during World War II and went through the consolidation in the 1970s and ’80s. They made their money on inventions on a wartime footing. Intuitive Machines is relatively small, but is still bidding on missions and being successful. Taking an intractably difficult mission like landing on the moon and doing it at a fixed price for about $100 million is just unheard of in the era of cost plus award fee contracting. About 75% to 80% of our business is with the U.S. government; the remainder is currently commercial and international. But since we landed on the moon we're seeing more requests from commercial companies and international governments to fly on our missions without NASA's involvement. Some interest has come directly to us from the Saudi space agency, the Australian space agency, Germany, Hungary, and JAXA—the Japanese space agency. 

You’ve been publicly traded since 2023. How is that phase of your growth going?

We went public on February 15, 2023, one year to the day before we launched to the moon. Our call sign is lunar—LUNR—on the NASDAQ. We have about 120 million shares. [The company’s market value was more than $500 million as of Aug. 16.] But there is a larger mission for us. If we're going to maintain global competitiveness, we have to find a way to break the back of the paradigm that it takes a decade or two to build a space system. The moon is here to stay and it is worth going all in to do this on behalf of the United States, for the United States.