Robots and The Moon 🌙
IM-1's lunar landing and True Anomaly's maneuvers without regret
An American company has landed on the Moon, and you can buy stock in it.
Intuitive Machines’ autonomous Nova-C lander, named Odysseus, touched down on Thursday evening, making it the first private organization to land on the Moon, and the first American effort since 1972. Three other companies have failed in attempts since 2019.
The scene was dramatic: The laser rangefinders the lander uses to gauge its distance from the ground failed—a very unfortunate technician had forgotten to flip the physical safety switches during installation. The mistake was discovered when Odysseus was already in lunar orbit after its 600,000 mile trip.
Luckily, NASA—which paid for most of the mission—had attached an experimental LiDAR sensor to the vehicle. Intuitive Machines engineers in Houston had their vehicle take an extra lap around the Moon, using the time to rewrite the lander’s software so it could use a functioning sensor to navigate. It wasn’t quite Apollo 13, but it was fast thinking and a gamble.
The lander flew to the surface autonomously, while we anxiously waited back on Earth. An antenna pointed to deep space detected faint signal. “We’re not dead yet,” Intuitive Machines’ CTO Tim Crain said after a few minutes. The lander was on the Moon and transmitting. The next day, IM revealed that the robot had wound up propped up on its side—descending a little too fast (6 mph) and moving slightly laterally, it had twisted during the fall. However, it can still talk to Earth, and the bulk of its payloads are still functional. (Only one item is on the panel facing the lunar surface—an artwork by Jeff Koons.)
Despite not quite sticking the landing, getting this close the first time around is a big deal, and bodes well for IM’s future attempts. This is the first of dozens of private missions headed to the Moon in the next several years, which will lay the groundwork for humans to return before the end of the decade. My 2018 book about the rocket billionaires now functions as a prologue to a world where NASA and private companies partner to return to deep space. And to pull the story further along, I’ve written a long profile of the Intuitive Machines’ cofounder Kam Ghaffarian in the New York Times Sunday business section.
Kam came to the US from Iran in 1977, and worked his way up from nothing to wealth and influence, launching futuristic companies. His memorable name caught my eye again and again as the financier and visionary in the background of different space companies, and it took months to convince him to participate in my story and get to know him.
While he’s a trained engineer, his real talent is building teams, the kind of soft skill many aerospace leaders lack, undergirded by mysticism and a commitment to exploring the universe. His career mirrors the recent evolution of the space industry: He made his first fortune leading a traditional NASA contractor, winning cost-plus awards to provide engineering services to the space agency. But after Elon Musk and SpaceX paved the way for private companies to control their own space vehicles and sell them to anyone who could pay, Kam started new companies: Intuitive Machines, which would focus on the infrastructure necessary to explore the Moon, and Axiom Space, which is building habitat in low-earth orbit and flying paid astronauts to the International Space Station. Last year, he took Intuitive public under the ticker symbol LUNR.
That’s not to mention his nuclear reactor company or the non-profit focused on the theory behind faster-than-light travel. Like I said, fascinating guy. Intuitive is just getting started—it will send a second mission to the Moon later this year—and there’s a lot more to see.
The other big news in space: Russia appears to have launched a prototype of a dangerous new orbital weapon. The scuttlebutt on this is hard to parse—it’s all Top Secret and has been a pawn in a Congressional battle over surveillance authorization—but my read is that this is a nuclear-powered electronic warfare satellite, which would use that power to put serious oomph into jamming or disabling other spacecraft, or an atomically-initiated electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon, which could fry satellites in its range. It’s likely not a traditional nuclear explosive.
The EMP in particular, though, would be something of a huge middle finger to the rest of the world, since it is an indiscriminate weapon—just one use could render chunks of the orbital environment impassable, choking them with debris from disabled spacecraft.
A key issue is, at least publicly, is that we don’t know exactly what Russia has put into orbit. US intelligence agencies might not have a perfect idea either: Besides eavesdropping and potential human sources, the US has sensors on the ground and in space which can examine other spacecraft, but typically from quite a distance.
The future is getting up and close and personal. That’s the subject of my other recent feature, about the company True Anomaly and the history of space warfare. True Anomaly is developing autonomous spacecraft, called Jackals, that are designed to perform close inspections in space; the first are set to launch next month. The idea, roughly speaking, is that when Russia is flying something potentially dangerous, the Jackals could scoot up there and analyze it with cameras and other sensors from just meters away. (Russia already has vehicles that do this; the US, at least publicly, does not.) The Jackals—and True Anomaly—are the brainchild of CEO Even Rogers, a former Air Force officer who specialized in playing the bad guy in space training exercises.
He’s a proponent of what space warfare aesthetes call “maneuver without regret,” or what you might call more colloquially, space dogfighting—the idea that satellites aren’t stable platforms in orbit for sensors and transceivers, but reactive vehicles that engage with each other and fly (relatively) freely in space. The technology for that isn’t quite ready for primetime, but figuring it out is True Anomaly’s mission. It’s also the culmination of years of theorizing about what conflict in space, a history that begins with a US debate about using nuclear weapons to destroy satellites during the Cold War. Plus ça change…
HOME NEWS
Dear readers, I have failed to follow the number one rule of posting: Consistent delivery. The beginning of the year passed in a blur of work and a brutal RSV infection that torched my household. Thank you for your continued interest my writing. More frequent and regular dispatches to follow; next week we will meet my favorite space voyeur.
BAR NOTES: It’s been cold and rainy in Oakland, so I’ve been on my winter cocktail menu: New York Sours, hot toddys, Martinezes, and nips from a bottle of Appleton Estate 12-Year Aged Rum I bought in Jamaica over the holidays. My magnolia tree is starting to bloom, however, which means spring and its beverages are on the way…
Great story. Great to have you back writing.