The third attempt to land on the Moon for Houston-based Intuitive Machines is coming up in less than a year and the company said Tuesday it understands how to stick the landing on the next go around.
During a first quarter earnings call, the company’s Chief Executive Officer, Steve Altemus, said the mission team performed a “comprehensive post-mission review” which included independent reviewers and external experts alongside the company’s internal teams.
He said there were three main issues that prevented their Nova-C lander, named Athena, from landing upright near the Moon’s South Pole on March 6:
- Laser altimeter interference during descent
- Challenging terrain and lighting effects
- Crater recognition tuning
“We saw signal noise and distortion that did not allow for accurate altitude readings,” Altemus said. “South Pole topography and low-angle sunlight created long shadows and dim lighting conditions that challenged the precision capability of our landing systems.”
Regarding the final point, Altemus said, “Our optical navigation used imagery from [the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter] at 100 km from the lunar surface that could not accurately account for how craters appear at lower altitudes with South Pole lighting conditions as you approach the landing site.”
He said that as the company prepares for the launch of its third Nova-C lander they’re working in adjustments to prevent to prevent a similar outcome from the IM-1 and IM-2 missions. Both of these missions were put together as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.
“We’ve added dissimilar and redundant altimeters to the sensor suite and they’re going through more rigorous and extreme flight-like testing than we’ve done before,” Altemus said. “We’ve incorporated an additional lighting-independent sensor for surface velocity measurements. We’ve expanded onboard terrain crater database for enhanced navigation across the surface of the Moon.
“Additionally, we collected the most detained imagery of the lunar South Pole on Mission 2 and we’re feeding this unique flight data directly into our machine learning algorithms to improve crater tracking and navigation performance in these extreme conditions.”
The IM-3 mission was selected by NASA in 2021 and came with a firm fixed-price contract valued at $77.5 million. The mission will carry four NASA science payloads to a region of the Moon called Reiner Gamma, located at 7.5 degrees North, 59 degrees West.
Two of those payloads are small rovers. The Lunar Vertext (Lvx) is a rover that will help study the magnetic fields present at Reiner Gamma and the Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Explorers (CADRE) are a pair of suitcase-sided rovers that carry multiple cameras and sensors to capture 3D imagery of the Moon’s surface.
The IM-3 mission will also include the first in a series of lunar data relay satellites designed to support NASA’s Near Space Network Services (NSNS) contract. Two more of these will launch on the IM-4 mission in 2027.
Lunar Terrain Vehicle latest
Pete McGrath, Intuitive Machines’ Chief Financial Officer, said the company’s first quarter revenue was $62.5 million, which was increase of about 14 percent from the fourth quarter of 2024. He said that was primarily due to payments from the IM-2 mission as well as progress milestones on the company’s lunar terrain vehicle proposal.
Altemus said the final proposals for for NASA’s Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) program will be due in late July and an award for a delivery mission is expected in the November timeframe. Asked by an investor if the proposed changes to the Artemis program as laid out in the President’s budget outline would impact Intuitive Machines’ ability to get its Moon Racer LTV to the Moon, Altemus said no.
He pointed the fact that Intuitive Machines plans to launch the LTV atop its larger Nova-D lander and the two would launch initially atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
“It’s a very nice packaging with the launch vehicle, the heavy cargo lander and the LTV to get autonomous roving assets to the Moon,” Altemus said. “And what’s important about that is that this continues our Moon-Mars strategy, which says learning about how to operate and do autonomous mobility on the Moon is directly applicable to the programs that would need the same capability at Mars.
“And so, we’re confident that the LTV’s procurement is moving forward in spite of the changes to the Artemis program with [the Space Launch System rocket], Orion and Gateway.”
As of now, NASA only intends to award one of the three contractors that’s working on an LTV with a demonstration mission. However, Altemis said that the draft request for proposal document does reference an option “to carry another vendor through the critical design review phase, which is about a year extension to the current phase that’s out there.”
Intuitive Machines is competing with Lunar Outpost’s Eagle rover and Venturi Astrolab’s Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX) rover for the NASA task order.
