YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Altemus

lines on the record: 40
first: 2023-12-21
most recent: 2023-12-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“From the launch vehicle. Then you commission your engines and fire it for the first time. The further we get towards the moon, the more success we have. So if we retire ninety-five percent of the risk on our way to the moon, that's a wild success for us. Even if we don't touch down softly and return NASA's data to them or the commercial data, we have retired significant risk and we've proven the economic model of trying to build the lowest cost lander and land on the moon for less than $100 million and build that in four years is a proven theory then. And it shows that you can execute. So that's kind of the way I look at it. You know, embrace the chance of failure and stand in the arena and give it a try.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of the people who have stood before us and tried to land on the moon. And we have in fact looked at every failure that's occurred and thought about that when we built our lander architecture. We've added redundancy in the systems, whether it's dissimilar redundancy or it's multiple strings of redundant things. We've looked at simplicity. We've looked at areas to provide more robustness where there seems to be a number of failures. And so in my mind, I've taken our failure probability to a 75% success rate. So there is still a significant opportunity to fail. But if you think about it, all the work that we've done today, the propulsion testing, the software testing, and then you get to the launch pad and you like the engine and you separate.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have diversified revenue streams. We have revenue from other business lines. The lender is something that we've taken great care to build with a lot of know-how from our days in NASA and in aerospace. And we've been able to go look at”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There has never been a commercial landing on the moon in history. So Intuitive Machines is aiming to be the first. And you're right, 40 to 45 percent of the missions fail going to the moons. Well, aware of that, you know, imagine building a business where you put everything on the line at the moment you like the rocket and you Right, but there's some thoughts here I have, if you'll indulge me. We have three missions to the moon. Failure is likely, like you indicated, we have now three shots at the moon, so we are not a company that builds one lander, and if it succeeds, we're successful. If it fails, we go under.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incredibly exciting to be, you know, people as aerospace engineers used to say, man, it would have been a great time to be alive during the Apollo program. And yet today, I think it's the best time to be alive as an aerospace engineer working on returning the United States to the moon for the first time in 52 years as a commercial company and the first ever mission to the South Pole of the Moon. That's our first one.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“SpaceX and Blue Origin both have SpaceX Mission 1 and Blue Origin Mission 2. They won those procurements to land humans on the moon. I was up on Capitol Hill talking to the appropriators and authorizers and different committees about Artemis. Optimistically NASA tends to be optimistic about when it can fly and maybe overpromises and then the dollars don't materialize and the hardware doesn't cooperate and they tend to underdiver and the programs cost more and take a lot longer. And so being realistic as a business certainly as a public company, we have to factor in our anticipated best guess of delays that are going to come associated with the Artemis program. And so I think it's 2030 before we see boots on the moon.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With the investment dollar to stretch the capabilities of this country and to our speed and execution of moving out into space. And intuitive machines bid that to develop that. And so we will deliver it to the surface if we win. And then we'll defer to NASA when they want to put their astronauts in it. So it's a really exciting model. And I think that's a breakthrough in business. And you know what it does? It makes us more globally competitive where we no longer have these government-run monolithic programs that take decades to deploy. We now have an ability to move with the speed and agility of the US economy, and that's a competitive edge for the United States all day long.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we actually are in the competition today. We submitted a proposal to NASA to build their lunar terrain vehicle, which is the F150 pickup truck that would take astronauts around the surface of the moon. And it's a very interesting and very disruptive kind of procurement that NASA's doing where we would own the rover and we would use it autonomously and commercially to move things around the surface of the moon. But NASA would buy it from us as a service when the astronauts are present. So they would take control of it. They would operate it with astronauts on board. And when the astronauts leave, we would operate it and we would move material and we would move logistics and we would do assembly with the robotic arm and make a business out of it. I think it's really exciting to see the kind of partnerships that we're creating with the government who is now embracing the commercial model and seeing how we blend the federal dollar.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the rockets and frequency of flight. It's almost becoming routine as they aim for 100 missions in a single year. So the moon were at her infancy. We've had a handful, like you said, of missions to the moon. And so intuitive machines, as we build our landers, we're building the same lander over and over and over again to make sure it's right and practiced and learning from every attempt. And so every attempt we try and we have three on the books and adding a fourth here shortly, those missions will help us understand the performance of the systems and we can adjust and tweak and redesign. And adjust and tweak and design and fly another one. Before we change to another model of lander or another category. And so I hope that that will help improve reliability as we go over and over again to the moon.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The more shots on goal, the more attempts, the more the learning, we're at the edge of an envelope of eking out the performance of a system. You know, think about the early days of Ferrari and racing and how they're on the edge and the limit and the failures they've had and how they've recovered and how the automotive company has come automotive industry has come a long way in reliability, the aircraft industry and a long way in reliability. You're seeing through commercial endeavor and innovation, SpaceX come a long way in terms of reliability.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's time. It's time in the seat. It's time. It's flying missions. So I like the idea of a number of shots on goal.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Falcon 9 and get it out to the lunch pad, do a rehearsal, and launch it on, I think the launch window opens at 1159 p.m. on January 12th.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we had a launch window in November, but there's priorities going off the launch pad all the time. And so we have to fit within the manifest of what's going off of Launchpad A at Kennedy Space Center. So SpaceX has given us a launch date for January 12th of 2024. We have a five-day window to get off. There's only a certain amount of days per month that you can fly to the moon where it's in the right position to where we can land at our designated landing site. So we're very excited about it. The lander has been ready for some time now since the end of September. And we will ship it later this month to the Cape for processing. We'll take Christmas off and get it fine touches to it and get it on its spacecraft adapter and get it encapsulated on”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Plant a flag and you own the land, the property that staked it out, you land, you own what they call a heritage site. And that means other countries or other companies that want to fly near you if you're declared as a heritage site need to coordinate with you before they land and damage any of the equipment that you have there, but you don't own the land or the mineral rights because you've landed there, but what you cash on the surface and what you bring back can be yours.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But technically, you don't own the real estate if you land. It's not the frontier days of the Wild Wild West where You went out and did.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question. And there's very little policy and governance, but there is some framework. So the Outer Space Treaty governs how we live and work in space. But how do we live and work on the moon? The United States offered to the world an agreement called the Artemis Accords, and it's very friendly to allowing commercialization rights of the moon. So if you land on the moon, you can bring back samples and own those samples per the Artemis Accords. It's not where they belong to the sovereign governments. They can belong to commercial companies. And I think that's important for the future of building a space economy centered around the moon. And I'm sure there will be a lot of legal Opinions when the first samples come back.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And that, I think, is a disruption. Disruption of you said it earlier that it costs $100 billion for Apollo missions. And we're trying to land on the moon for $100 million. It's orders of magnitude cheaper. Launch access has become affordable again. SpaceX caused that disruption and it's fantastic for us.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we have Rovers Hoppers, which is a drone, rocket-pelled drone that. Fly 25 kilometers away from the lander, all kinds of items that extend from scientific instruments to commercial sponsorships to art projects to telescopes that stare at the Milky Way. Of those are payloads that we fly, and we can charge roughly a million dollars a kilogram to take those payloads to the moon, whether that's a government payload or commercial payload. So if you can do that, that's roughly $100 million plus of revenue that you can generate with each mission to the moon. Now you say, okay, how do you fly, fix price to the moon for less than $100 million?”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they take us through that first phase out of the Earth's atmosphere and into space. So now we have the infrastructure to launch and transport our lander to the moon. And the first lander takes about 130 kilograms of payload to the surface.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've actually diversified to the point where our business model is really to install the infrastructure in and around the moon to support sustained human presence. So if you think about it, like an expeditionary force, the first thing you need to do is land. Then you establish communications, then you establish navigation to move further away from your lander, and then you start bringing up heavier and heavier cargo. So we built an entire mini Apollo program, if you will, one that you could operate the mission from a mission control. And then you need a rocket to get you off of Earth. And we contract with SpaceX to buy their Falcon 9 rockets.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you want to have the lightest weight lander that you can because it takes so much energy to get out of the gravity well of Earth to the moon and then descend it softly to the surface of the moon inside its gravity well. So all of that is energy management. You know, our business economics for the lander are to sell payloads at a price per kilogram. So every kilogram of lander mass is one less kilogram of payload mass that we could sell to make the business profitable.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what we do is right here in Houston, we have been building the Nova Sea Lunar Lander, which is about 2,000 kilograms, stands about 14 feet high. Maybe six or seven feet diameter. And we make everything basically vertically integrated as a company. There's a few items that we purchase, but a bulk of them we manufacture in-house. We actually additively manufacture or 3D print our own engines. And then we test them right here. We're on Spaceport, Houston, the Ellington Airport.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An incredible challenge to go to the moon when you transition from flying highly dynamic environment of flying from Earth. The atmosphere Into space and then capturing into the moon, orbiting the moon, descending down to Surface that's not defined by sea level. It's a very mountainous terrain with craters, and there's no navigation. And so what you have to do with no pilot in command, have the ability to navigate on your own, to carry everything with you you need to sort out where the surface is, we have kind of a mean surface of the moon, a general idea of what the surface of the moon reference line is. But if you land on a crater,”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you're correct. It's only been India and China. India being the latest, and you saw the recent Russian mission to the moon failed on the way.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you can see all the pockmarks on the moon with the naked eye, right? And then with a telescope, it's just Swiss cheese. But if we think about mining. At the rate that we consume rare earth minerals and materials. We now have pristine areas that would have to be strip mined to find the last bastion of materials that we're looking for. We don't want to do that. We don't want to destroy our earth. So if there's an alternate source, mining on the moon can become a real source of commerce for us as a planet.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, certainly from Earth and from satellites in around the Moon, you can gather imagery data that can tell you, hey, let's go to the South Pole. The South Pole looks like it has incredible amount of water ice. entrained in the soil. Let's go see if it's actually there. How much water is there? Can we make drinking water from that? Can we make propellants, liquid oxygen from that? Can we make consumables for humans from that? And so you can get some idea. And the question is, do you want to take the next step and actually go explore? On the surface”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about trying to describe what the planet Earth looks like from those handful of missions where you have just small, small excursions away from your lander, you know nothing about the planet Earth at that point. You don't know oceans. You don't know terrain. You don't know mountains and desert. You know where you landed from a very like looking through a straw, very small amount of knowledge. Right. I think that's where we are now. You know, for all of the moon rocks that we brought back in the history of humanity. There's only 360 kilograms of material. There are so many unknowns about the Moon, how much water ice is entrained in the soil. Where are the rare metals and minerals that have bombarded the moon for?”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. The Chinese were ramping up their program and having success after success, after success, orbiting the moon, landing on the far side of the moon, roving on the moon, returning a sample from the moon, those kinds of things.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“China was coming on strong, and the U.S. needed to set the norms and behaviors of how we live and work in space to be more peaceful and more civilian focused. And so they created a directive that said, let's return humans to the moon in a sustainable way. And that was in 2018.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That all was well and good, and we were kind of bouncing on the bottom somewhat, single digit millions revenue, not really gaining traction with any of the inventions. We found it difficult to work in the healthcare industry and to provide medical devices in that institutional bureaucracy of healthcare. We had trouble breaking into oil and gas and the drones were restricted by the FAA, the regulations weren't allowing them to fly in the airspace where it turned, guy, was in 2018. The National Security Council and a National Space Council declared that the moon was now of strategic interest.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The time, no, it actually wasn't. What we were trying to do was to provide solutions for those industries. And so we were inventing, we had 24 inventions in the first five years of the company. We had four ventures that were spinning out of the company. We were just producing things. One of them was a long range over the horizon fixed-wing drone of 55 pound class drone that could avoid traffic in the airspace and fly over the horizon for pipeline inspections.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Healthcare, the Texas Medical Center is one of the largest medical centers in the world. And aerospace right outside of Johnson Space Center. So let's solve intractable problems in those three industries using our human spaceflight engineering techniques and methodologies and practices, which are highly refined. And that was the genesis. That's all I had was like that idea. a deal with my co-founder Cam Gaffarian and we shook hands over a dinner meeting and he says Steven would be a shame if the music in your head was never played let's go do this I'll support you I'll invest in you let's go build this company”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The agency was still and the executive branch and the legislature were still about a capabilities driven architecture with no plan to go back to the moon. And so there was no real thirst to go after NASA work or to do spaceflight work. So we formed ourselves kind of as a think tank. And what we did was we stepped outside the gate of Johnson Space Center, which is here in Houston. And we said, what are the industries in and around us? Well, it's mainly oil and gas.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was the beginning of intuitive machines. That was where a true sense of entrepreneurship came from. And I subsequently left the agency to form intuitive machines in 2013, realizing that you had to take control of your environment to make an impact in one person was absolutely capable of changing the world.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The farthest we got with that robot was to deliver it to International Space Station where it Walked up and down the space station cleaning the ductwork.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, an animated video. And so I took it to work on Monday and showed my divisions and said, let's go do something amazing. Unleash our minds from these imposed constraints and do something that just shocks everybody and put a walking robot on the moon in a thousand days. We went ahead and built a lunar lander testbed to flying on Earth and we built a walking robot. We flew the walking robot to space station and we flew the lander by itself about 37 times successfully launched it from Earth and landed it on a simulated lunar landscape at Kennedy Space Center at the shuttle landing facility.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So he went upstairs, made a video of a robot on the moon looking back at Earth saying, you know, I see you in sign language.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly right. The moon was a four-letter word at the time. We've been there in Apollo. We don't need to go back. And so, you know, I came home for dinner one Friday evening and I told my son, you know, I'm just NASA is just not going anywhere. And he said, Dad, you never talk bad about NASA. What's the matter? And I told him. And he said, well. What are you going to do about it? And so he and I came up with an idea to put a walking robot on the moon in a thousand days.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So we're like a Ferrari running at And I really wanted to step on the gas and see what we could do. And not be entangled in a bureaucracy that was forced through. Legislative direction to kind of dither and just study capabilities”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was just getting frustrated because here I was in charge of an organization that was Essentially, the NFL of engineering, right? Imagine just a premier engineering organization.”
2023-12-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT