Landing on the Moon: The Transformative Future of Aerospace

On this episode of The Shift Code, PMI CEO Pierre Le Manh chats with aerospace pioneer and CEO of Intuitive Machines, Steve Altemus, about how his revolutionary company achieved the first U.S. moon landing in over 50 years, and how he continues to keep the aerospace industry on the cutting-edge by making it faster, more agile, and more accessible for the emerging space economy.

Transcript

STEVE ALTEMUS  

What we’ve tried to do is find lean and affordable ways to work, set arbitrary and inflexible milestones and meet those. Innovation comes out of overly constrained budgets, overly constrained schedules and a very difficult technical challenge. Forced innovation is what happens when you take on that insurmountable challenge. You dig in, you roll up your sleeves and you do. 

PIERRE LE MANH  

That’s the voice of Steve Altemus. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Intuitive Machines, the first commercial business to successfully land on the moon, piloting the autonomous lander Odysseus to the moon’s south pole.   

I am Pierre Le Manh, CEO of the Project Management Institute, (PMI). Welcome to The Shift Code, a podcast dedicated to the intersection of leadership, change management and real-world impact.  

In this episode, I talk with Steve about managing an incredible first-ever project, and also about building a first-generation company for the emerging space economy.   

Intuitive Machines is transforming the aerospace industry to make it faster, more agile and also more affordable. It’s an amazing story with lessons for leaders in any business. And yes, Steve has some insights to share on fellow space entrepreneur Elon Musk.  

So, let’s get to it. This is The Shift Code. 

MUSICAL TRANSITION 

PIERRE LE MANH 

Welcome to The Shift Code. I am Pierre Le Manh, CEO of PMI. Today, I’m speaking with Steve Altemus. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Intuitive Machines. 

STEVE ALTEMUS  

Pleasure to be here, Pierre. Thanks very much for having me today. 

PIERRE LE MANH 

So, Steve, I’d like to talk about 2024 for a second—[a] monumental year for Intuitive Machines with new contracts, new breakthroughs. The Odysseus mission, in particular, has marked the first commercial vehicle to land on the moon and the first U.S. presence since 1972 on the moon. So, tell us a little bit, what does it take to deliver such a high-stakes project, and how did your team tackle its challenges? 

STEVE ALTEMUS  

A lot of hard work went into getting ready for the Odysseus mission. We went public the year before, in 2023, February of 2023. And we were in the public eye when we took on that monumental challenge to, one year later, land on the moon as the first commercial company.  

It was years and years of preparation, starting way back in my career at NASA when I was the engineering director at the Johnson Space Center for human space flight programs: the Space Shuttle, the [International] Space Station, the Constellation program. And I started an entrepreneurial initiative within NASA to actually build a liquid oxygen, liquid methane lander test bed for Earth-based flights. And the idea was to put a walking robot on the moon in a thousand days. 

We built and flew that lander 37 times. Play that forward—in 2018, Intuitive Machines won the contract to attempt to take commercial landers to the moon for NASA’s benefit. And we were awarded our first mission in 2019. And so, four years later, probably $100 million, we successfully landed on the south pole, which was unheard of—both price disruption and first of its kind as a commercial company. So, a lot of years in the making. 

PIERRE LE MANH 

And I’m sure you’ve got plans, and you try to plan for everything, but you get surprises right? How did you prepare for the unexpected?  

STEVE ALTEMUS 

When I look back at the challenges that we faced during the mission itself—now, forget about all the development testing of trying to get to the launch pad and get off the ground—when we actually flew the mission, there were so many different challenges we faced every single day. And the way we prepared for that, specifically to answer your question, is we made the mission control team, or the operations team, practice the nominal mission like 80% of the time. And the other 20% of the time were used to develop utility skills that could be applied in various situations. So not necessarily running a bunch of scenarios, failure scenarios, because you can’t encompass all of them.  

You have limited time. What we did was practice so there was no human intervention of this robotic autonomous mission that would destroy the mission or end the mission. And then practice a set of skills to reorient the space craft, to ignite the engine, to re-establish communications, basic utility skills. And that technique served us very well through the 8 1/2-day transit and loiter and then the 10-day mission on the surface. 

PIERRE LE MANH  

How many times did you have to use those skills—the unplanned events that trigger the use of these skills that you developed on the side? 

STEVE ALTEMUS 

I would say every day if not every shift. Every shift had to learn how to do something that was unplanned. Because imagine this—we built a Ferrari equivalent of a spacecraft having never driven one before. So then to actually fly this spacecraft on the way to the moon, we had to learn what it was capable of—what we were capable of—and had to really kind of let the machine talk to us and tell us what needed to happen in order for it to fly safely to the moon.  

PIERRE LE MANH 

So how did it work in the ‘60s then, because they did not have all these simulation capabilities that we have now. Like, how did it work back then? 

STEVE ALTEMUS  

They had a lot of resources to bring to bear, but certainly they did not have the sophisticated tools and techniques and software and computer power that we were afforded so that we could practice. What they did was invent the computer. What we did was use existing computers that were high speed and incredible software. So we had an advantage in the end. 

PIERRE LE MANH  

But you did this for a fraction of the cost, right? And much faster as well. 

STEVE ALTEMUS  

Yeah. One investor actually said to me, “Steve, doesn’t it take like a trillion dollars to go to the moon?” And we did it for $100 million.  

PIERRE LE MANH  

That’s crazy. 

STEVE ALTEMUS 

It’s quite disruptive to the industry and the space sector. 

PIERRE LE MANH  

We thought this was an industry owned by space agencies, and now we’re seeing all this disruption. What do you think about this transformation of the industry by smaller, more agile players, like Intuitive Machines? 

STEVE ALTEMUS 

I think this a great time to be alive as an aerospace engineer and be the leader of an aerospace company because the commercial sector’s been given such an opportunity. Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the space race was all about government-led, monolithic programs. That drove a lot of innovation within the government. They had these large cost plus award fee contracting mechanisms that just threw money at the problem. Well now, I think the space race with China is healthy to drive forward at a pace with some urgency to get back to the moon for strategic purposes. And then how do you do that? The U.S. economy’s ability to innovate with speed and agility is our greatest strength. And so, I think leveraging or igniting the U.S. economy and small companies to innovate through solving intractable problems like flying to the moon in four years for $100 million, so much innovation came out of that. And as a result, our larger space program and global space programs could be more competitive and not be bogged down by large overhead rates or multidecadal programs that are cost prohibitive to maintain or sustain.  

So I really like this turn of events, where the government comes out and says, for fixed price, can you deliver this as a service? And some of these contracts actually have a long service tail. If you meet the early development need that they’re looking for, fixed price, you can get 10 years of follow-on service out of it. And so, if as a company you can adapt to that kind of business economics, you can succeed. 

PIERRE LE MANH 

Do you think that basically your company is to space exploration what agile is to project management? 

STEVE ALTEMUS  

I think you can think about it that way. What we’ve tried to do is find lean and affordable ways to work. We’ve had a set of tenets that said, “Set arbitrary and inflexible milestones and meet those to drive the team toward a resolution of problems.” Innovation comes out of overly constrained budgets, overly constrained schedules, and a very difficult technical challenge. Forced innovation is what happens when you take on that insurmountable challenge. I think with agile, it’s the same kind of thing. You set these near-term goals. You meet those goals. You clean up afterwards. You assess it, and you set another intractable goal. 

PIERRE LE MANH 

It's more iterative, more incremental. 

STEVE ALTEMUS  

Yes, very much like that. 

PIERRE LE MANH 

Did you get your funding that way as well? Or did you need the $100 million upfront? How did it work? 

STEVE ALTEMUS 

We really haven’t been well-funded our whole lives. We’ve had to earn it from contracting and generating business. For the mission itself, the government paid us in milestones—eight to 12 milestones in the first mission, and that’s essentially how we funded the first mission. They hold back 10% of the whole mission cost until you’re successful at the end. So you’re not even working with the whole contract value. You’re working with 10% less. So forget about any profit margin in those first early missions.  

PIERRE LE MANH  

And how do you convince investors to invest in your venture? Is it the kind of high risk/high reward activity? Or do you sell them something more traditional in a way from an investment standpoint? 

STEVE ALTEMUS 

What the investors have realized is that Intuitive Machines is more than a lunar lander company. We’re a diversified space exploration company with three pillars of business: the business of delivering things to the surface of the moon, transportation leg, if you will; the idea of data transmission, a space and ground network where you can communicate and navigate around the moon; and the third thing is developing and providing infrastructure on the surface and around the moon in a way where you can offer that as a service. That package of delivery services from scientific landers to heavy cargo landers, to data transmission back and forth with position, navigation and timing accuracy, on the surface of the moon, to operating autonomously infrastructure on the moon, is a very unique combination that enables a lunar economy. And it serves almost as a platform for anything anybody wants to do on the moon. The commercial model for how you deliver goods and services in space exploration has fundamentally changed, where the commercial sector is an integral partner in putting in the infrastructure to support a lunar economy. 

PIERRE LE MANH  

Let me go back a little bit to your years at NASA. You spent, as you said, decades there, and you chose to leave. That’s a courageous move. Can you tell us a bit how that happened, and how did you feel the world would be outside of NASA? 

STEVE ALTEMUS  

Wow, good question about how I felt about how I thought the world was outside of NASA, and I was extremely naive. I was at NASA for 25 years. I started at the Kennedy Space Center, and part of my job was launching space shuttles into orbit from the control center, leading that team. And I did that for a number of shuttle missions until we lost the Columbia Orbiter, if you recall back in 2003. And then I led the reconstruction of that orbiter at the hangar at Kennedy Space Center to put the 85,000 pieces back together and determine the forensics of the root cause of the accident.  

Well out of that, NASA moved me to Johnson Space Center where I became the head of engineering for the human space flight programs. I think I developed three different human space flight architectures to how you move humans off the planet and live and work in space. And at the time, the frustration was all three of those were essentially refuted or turned down. It was clear to me at that time that there was no interest in returning to the moon, and so at that point I said, why don’t I try my hand at business.  

So, I left the agency, stepped outside the gate of NASA in Houston and formed Intuitive Machines. I thought there would be just an incredible outpouring of support—I knew a lot of people in the community—but it was… I was listening to crickets all day and all night because there was nobody knocking on the door. You had to earn your right to be in business and to earn your success every single day.  

PIERRE LE MANH 

You still went very fast, right? Because it’s not like you waited for 15 years before you got a first contract. 

STEVE ALTEMUS 

I started as a think tank where we would solve intractable problems using our engineering skills, methodologies and processes from human space flight. And thinking that we could do it faster, leaner, more affordably. And with that lean, affordable approach, we could solve problems in the industries right here in Houston, which is the energy sector, the healthcare sector and the space sector. And that’s how we started the business. And you know what Pierre, the five years basically of wandering in the wilderness trying to decern what the business was actually going to be about was where we collected this incredible team. We were able then, when we had the opportunity to bid on the lunar mission, we had the capability to actually execute on it. 

PIERRE LE MANH 

Did you have to readjust the way you lead going from NASA to a startup and now a scale-up? Is it very different from a human standpoint and leadership standpoint? 

STEVE ALTEMUS  

Yeah. When I left the agency as the deputy director of Johnson Space Center, I had 12,000 people under my purview, and then when I started as a startup, I was one of six initial people that came on board. And you have to do everything yourself at the startup; there isn’t infrastructure support or a staff. You just have to do it, and so you have to relearn a lot of those basic skills. You dig in. You roll up your sleeves, and you do. And so when people see you doing that, stepping essentially down from leading a large organization to actually stepping in and doing the work, it motivates them.  

PIERRE LE MANH 

But are you readjusting your leadership to back to what you were doing before at NASA or is it never going to be the same now? 

STEVE ALTEMUS 

Well, no. It’s definitely different. What we say when we hire a civil servant is they take about a year or so to thaw out and really get a sense of the business, and one of the things that I did not have at NASA was the business acumen that’s required to build a business. 

PIERRE LE MANH 

How do you learn that?  

STEVE ALTEMUS 

You learn [by] baptism by fire, I guess. Two words of advice from the chairman of the business, the co-founder with me, he said “Steve, you have to never go in the red. Always stay in the black.” And that was the business counsel I got when I started, and so immediately get on the map, generate some revenue, get going that way to fuel the business so that you have another day to survive and another day to survive.  

PIERRE LE MANH  

How did you get your first contract?  

STEVE ALTEMUS 

The first contract we got was a contract with Lockheed Martin. And some of the skills we had in the team, Lockheed wanted them for the mission where they rendezvoused with an asteroid. And so that aero-shape modeling and how the gravitational effects of the asteroid and all the variability of that would affect the space craft was something that we did for them. I think that contract was like $2 million, and that was pretty good start.  

MUSICAL TRANSITION  

PIERRE LE MANH  

I love hearing how Steve learned to navigate different kinds of operations and different aspects of his business. We all need to keep learning and growing, whatever our career stage. So how do you make decisions in an environment like the space economy, where the opportunities and risks are constantly shifting?   

We’ll talk about that… after the break. Stay with us.    

I am Pierre Le Manh, and this is The Shift Code. Before the break, we heard Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus talk about landing a spacecraft on the moon as a private company. Now we dig into how he’s building momentum around a lunar economy through both deliberate steps and big dreaming. Along the way, we talk about Elon Musk, the value of moon rocks and more. Let’s get back to it. 

MUSICAL TRANSITION 

PIERRE LE MANH  

For this Odysseus mission, you used a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. So, everybody’s talking a lot about Elon Musk. Most people have an opinion about Elon Musk, and he definitely influenced the aerospace industry in a big way. How aligned are your visions for the future of space exploration with Elon’s? 

STEVE ALTEMUS 

With respect to how to run a business that is doing things that have never been done before, we have similar philosophies. In terms of SpaceX and Intuitive Machines, both testing early in the development process, testing often and learning from your failures. Correcting and testing again—not fearing failure but embracing it and failing forward, we call it. For the main engine, for example, that we developed, we 3D print that in house, and we test fire it in house, and we did 40-some different designs.  

In terms of the vision for space, we’re passionate about space collectively—Elon Musk and SpaceX, Intuitive Machines, myself. I think I’m approaching it with the moon as our guiding star, and I think SpaceX looks at it from the Mars aspect as their guiding star. And I just think that putting in all the infrastructure around the moon is the way to create a lunar economy and create a sustained presence off planet at a celestial body.  

PIERRE LE MANH  

As a first step, or just because already you see the moon as potentially having a big role in humanity’s future? 

STEVE ALTEMUS 

Having studied the number of architectures for the moon and for Mars, there are a lot of engineer systems that need to be thoughtfully developed and deployed and tested in space before you can support a Mars colony or humans on Mars. And I think the moon is an essential steppingstone to learning how to live and work off-planet. Just think about the logistic supply to having a human outpost, and how do you bring all those logistics up to the surface to make them available? How do you move them around the surface, mobility? What can you harvest from the environment to lessen your reliance on logistics resupply? And so I think the moon gives us a chance to engineer those systems, learn from those practices so that we can take the next step further and further out into the solar system. 

PIERRE LE MANH  

And is the ambition you have for Intuitive Machines, to become a massively giant organization, or do you want to stay small and agile? What’s your ideal? Of course, you’re a listed company, so I’m sure you have to sell growth, but.  

STEVE ALTEMUS  

Well, I see the company growing at the right pace. Part of it is, from a project management standpoint, you have to stay on cost, budget, schedule and performance. So we don’t over hire or increase our facility footprint just for scale reasons. We do it out of necessity in a very deliberate and focused way. I think we’ll never lose that culture, no matter how big it is we grow as a business. 

PIERRE LE MANH 

If you think of the top priorities for Intuitive Machines in the next five, 10 years, what would that be? 

STEVE ALTEMUS  

Our next mission, we’ll actually drill for water ice and hop into a shadowed region and look for water ice. And so that will be incredible also, in terms of a first and maybe some findings. 

PIERRE LE MANH 

And you’re hoping to find life or something like that? 

STEVE ALTEMUS  

Just demonstrate the engineering systems that will be needed for prospecting and for discovery in the future. Let’s do that. And so, repeatability in terms of landing at a regular cadence of missions on the moon. We then will deploy the data relay satellites, which we’re under contract to do. Establish a navigation scheme, like a lunar GPS system. 

PIERRE LE MANH 

Right, because that doesn’t exist now. It’s not like you land on the moon, and you’ve got your GPS system in place. 

STEVE ALTEMUS 

There is no infrastructure, and so what you want to do is be able to enable others to land on the moon using the navigation scheme. And then, operate infrastructure.  

PIERRE LE MANH  

Like what? Like water supply, like electricity? What would it be? 

STEVE ALTEMUS 

So, one is mobility. How do you drive around the surface and get from one place to the other? The next thing is, how do you generate power for the systems that come up, that you can keep them warm or operate them in the extreme environments? And then the third thing is, how do you make the most of the resources that are there in order to limit your logistics resupply needs? And then eventually, why not bring some of those materials that are valuable to Earth back?  

PIERRE LE MANH 

And is there reasonable prospect that we will be able to bring stuff back that is going to be of value? 

STEVE ALTEMUS  

Oh, absolutely. I’m firmly convinced that there’s valuable resources at the moon. Neil Armstrong picked up rocks, and just walking around the surface in that small little area, those rocks had materials and minerals that we had never saw on Earth before. And he just picked them off the surface. So imagine if we actually did it in a methodical way, to survey the lunar surface, to prospect for rare materials. What would we find? And what would be the demand back on Earth? 

PIERRE LE MANH 

Wonderful. Steve, thank you so much for sharing your personal story, your insights, the incredible story of your organization. You make us dream, and it’s been a privilege to hear about the transformation you’re driving. Thank you so much. 

STEVE ALTEMUS  

Thank you, Pierre. Thanks for having me on. 

MUSICAL TRANSITION  

PIERRE LE MANH  

Listening to Steve, it’s hard not to get excited about the potential of the lunar economy. And there are broader lessons too: If we want out-of-this-world results, we need to take on what Steve calls “insurmountable challenges.” We have to look beyond the constraints—and actually use the constraints—to unlock innovation. We also need to understand all we can about the business we’re in.  

Steve didn’t rest on his vast engineering knowledge. He’s also learned about contracts and cash flows and so much more. We can do more, faster and better, if we understand the full context of our mission.  

I’m Pierre Le Manh. Thanks for listening.