When a handful of vehicles left the hangar door of the Intuitive Machines (IM) production facility, easily entered traffic, and drove to Ellington Field, an aerospace facility outside of Houston, the dawn just broke, where the young company was testing engines that will land on the moon. Device.

The core of the small caravan of pickup trucks and trailers is a flatbed truck with a rocket engine installed behind it-what the IM staff call a mobile test bench. "Instead of building a $500,000 test facility in a remote location, we purchased a $16,000 truck and modified it," said Steve Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines.

The vehicle passed the gate, stopped at the security checkpoint, and then continued onto the abandoned taxiway. The big yellow X painted on the asphalt indicates that the taxiway no longer exists. The staff parked the test bed more than 30 feet away from the command trailer, and then began the familiar process of preparing the rig to fire.

To other people at the airport, the trailer and the flatbed look like a pair of random vehicles, but to the staff of Intuitive Machines, they are a lunar lander called Nova-C. The nozzle of the main engine protrudes from the back of the plate, next to it is a vacuum chamber for reaction control thruster testing. Methane, oxygen and nitrogen tanks are isolated behind the explosion-proof wall. The command trailer is another DIY creation that contains the first iteration of the lander's flight control system. Don't mind how inconsistent with our idea of ​​the appearance of the spacecraft: this dissected, roadworthy test machine has some hardware (and software), and it may be the first American spacecraft to land gently on the moon Since the 1970s.

NASA's plan to return to the moon began with a team of robotic landers. The space agency has turned to private companies to achieve these ambitions, and there are now more than a dozen large and small companies building a new generation of robotic lunar landers.

In May 2019, NASA awarded task orders to three of them: Astrobotic Technology in Pittsburgh; Edison, OrbitBeyond and Intuitive Machines in New Jersey. (Due to financial problems, OrbitBeyond cancelled the mission order two months later.) Astrobotic plans to ship 11 payloads to the moon next year. Its destination is Lacus Mortis, a large crater on the near side. Intuitive Machines will also deliver packages to the moon next year. It has six payloads heading to Oceanus Procellarum, which is a lunar "sea", which looks like a black spot on the moon due to its basalt lava surface. At the end of 2023, Astrobotic will return to the South Pole of the Moon with another set of payloads. Also in 2023, the third supplier, Firefly Aerospace, will conduct experiments in the "non-polar regions of the moon", and the fourth supplier, Masten Space Systems, will sign a contract to "deliver and operate" 8 payloads to the south pole of the moon.

Numerous partners reflect NASA's new business focus. The space agency did not build the spacecraft to the company's specifications, but asked the industry to provide mission-ready hardware, which can be used by any customer who can pay for travel. This is a method suitable for cargo transportation, and despite unwelcome delays, it also applies to the regular travel of astronauts to the International Space Station.

"For NASA, we need to succeed," Altemus said. "If we fail, they will not continue to take these risks."

To make matters worse, other companies (including billionaire-backed Blue Origin and SpaceX) have also joined the competition and promised to compete fiercely on future orders for lunar missions. This is a cruel field, and competitors are in lawsuits. In August, Blue Origin filed a lawsuit against NASA, alleging that NASA "made an illegal and improper evaluation of the proposal" when it chose SpaceX to build the next lunar landing vehicle for astronauts. At the same time, China is advancing a successful rover exploration program, introducing geopolitical strategies and national pride into an already complex landscape.

This puts the daily pressure on the IM team to push the project forward and leads to prolonged engine start-ups on abandoned taxiways.

This special test will take place in January 2020, which is eight months after the contract is awarded. (Nine months later, NASA will award another contract to IM to provide a combination rig/mass spectrometer to the moon by the end of 2022.) It will take several hours for IM engineers on the tarmac to prepare the test bed for action . They connected the power and data cables, set up a high-resolution camera on a tripod, endured countless dry valve "click" checks, and finally put on protective blue overalls and a helmet with a face mask to load low-temperature oxygen.

The rhythm is as brisk as the air in January, but the atmosphere is friendly and collaborative. Everyone participates in mediocre checklist items, such as unraveling cables or setting up awnings, regardless of their discipline or level in the company.

By any standard, this small Houston startup with approximately 130 employees works in an aerospace pressure cooker. So why is everyone here smiling? "We like to do things much faster than NASA," said Greg Vajdos, IM's Nova-C lander project manager and former employee of Boeing and NASA.

After the Apollo project ended, the moon became a forgotten destination. There may be a lot of discussions about market formation, and even the high-priced Google X Prize has reached the surface, but since 1976, only China has landed on the moon.

Today, the resumption of lunar exploration in the United States has become a national priority. In March 2018, NASA established the Commercial Lunar Payload Service (CLPS) program, creating a fleet of small robotic landers and rover to reconnaissance the moon as a pioneer in manned missions.

It is a necessary precursor to the more ambitious Artemis project, which is NASA's plan with commercial and international partners to establish a long-term human presence on the moon and eventually use it as a springboard for Mars exploration. The first step: the lunar lander can transport 22 pounds of payload to the lunar surface.

When NASA made it clear its intention to land on the moon, Intuitive Machines threw the hat into the ring and turned the startup to the moon plan. For refugees from NASA's Johnson Space Center, the company is a safe haven, where Altemus serves as the director of engineering. During his tenure at NASA, the agency initiated dozens of space shuttle flights, from the return flight after the Challenger to the retirement of the space shuttle. But life at NASA is terrible for him. "We tried to create a sense of urgency," Altemus said. "We completed the retirement of the space shuttle, and we completed the assembly of the International Space Station. Then we canceled the constellation program, and all of this turned into goalless capacity building. We said, based on this, let us jump up."

Intuitive Machines started as a hybrid commercial company/thinkThank, which researched engineering solutions for the aerospace, energy, and healthcare industries. The joint venture is supported by Kam Ghaffarian, co-founder of Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies, NASA's second-largest engineering services provider.

But until 2018, flying drones on the fire field, rather than landing on the moon, has been the top priority of IM's agenda. Altmus said that at that time, the U.S. policy on the moon created a new "mission focus and sense of urgency" for the moon. This small company defeated other companies in the first CLPS release, and the game began. The staff has doubled, and Intuitive Machines now has NASA veterans and newly graduated engineers.

After Mario Maggio obtained a master's degree in aeronautical engineering (focusing on bio-astronautics) at the University of Colorado Boulder, he wanted to come to Houston, which is still a beacon for manned spaceflight. Now, the 25-year-old is a member of NASA's lunar lander team. He said: "There are not too many people who are not retired who have the moon landing experience."

University partners in the Nova-C project include Utah State University, the University of Colorado, Embraer Aeronautical University, and Texas A&M University. There is also a local community college with an office in the IM Houston facility, which is a conduit for transforming students into high-tech workshop employees.

This young company has another legacy from NASA: the pride of Texas. "This is our birthright as a city," Altemus said. "If Houston can't let the team land on the moon, which city can?"

His optimism survived disappointment. Intuitive Machines worked with Boeing to develop NASA's manned lander, but Boeing lost the manned landing system (HLS) bidding battle between contestants from Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Dynetics. Nevertheless, after developing the hardware for the Artemis project, IM employees believed they had enough space. For example, their 3D printed VR3500 lander engine maintained a record of the duration of continuous testing at the Marshall Space Flight Center's No. 115 test stand. It may also become part of other equipped landers. IM spokesperson Josh Marshall (Josh Marshall) said: "We hope to cooperate with one of the companies that has been awarded an HLS contract."

Like other industries, IM is being boosted by the historic confluence of government funding and commercial potential-none of this makes much sense if IM does not insist on landing.

In April 2019, when SpaceIL, an Israeli private organization, closed in the last minutes of its lunar journey, the aviation community received a dramatic reminder of how difficult it is to land on the moon. The Beresheet lander flew 3.4 million miles, leaving only 10 miles.

The spacecraft began to fly to the ground, using an automated system to activate the main thrusters and slow down the spacecraft. SpaceIL’s senior systems engineer Yoav Landsman recalled during the landing: “The orbital speed is about 1.7 kilometers per second, and it needs to be reduced to zero to reach the surface gently.”

"Orbital physics is that if you reduce speed, you lose altitude," he said. "You really start to fall toward the ground at higher and higher vertical speeds." When it comes to the moon, gravity is the real enemy. "Lack of atmosphere is not the main criterion," Lanzman said. "Landing on an asteroid without an atmosphere is more like docking with a space station than landing, because their gravitational pull is very weak. On the other hand, the moon is very different because it is big and has a great pull."

The SpaceIL team uploaded a command to the spacecraft to rotate it, point the main engine in the direction of orbital speed, and then start the engine. The orbital speed started to drop and it took almost 15 minutes to return to zero. Another unresolved rotation will cause the spacecraft to enter the landing direction, descend directly and use the main engine to decelerate to a near stop.

The telemetry indicator light flashed red at 19:22; the lander fell at a speed of nearly 75 meters per second. Then the lights dim: malfunction.

The SpaceIL team scrambled to restart the system. In this case, “because of the long distance leads to a lag in communication, the possibility of intervention is very small,” Lanzman said. "You need to get the signs of failure, make a decision, and send a response. If the failure causes the engine to shut down, then you can't start it in time as ordered by the earth."

The engine did restart, but it was too late. The vertical speed of Beresheet is 134 meters per second and the horizontal speed is 947 meters per second. At only a mile from the surface, the lander is doomed to fail. The signal loss, like a coffin closing, occurred at 19:23.

Landsman said this is a lesson in deep space engineering. "This means that autonomous processes should be very robust and flexible, with appropriate onboard redundancy and backup management," he said. He may have learned another lesson; his skill set may be useful in the emerging lunar industry.

"Since there are not many people in the world sending spacecraft to the surface of the moon, I feel that I have a huge responsibility to help mankind achieve the next great leap," he said. "I'm currently taking the first step in starting my own business company to make the moon landing more affordable and convenient."

Rob Morehead is the head of space propulsion at IM and the designer of the main engine and reaction control system (RCS) engine. He sits in the command trailer and stares intently at the schematic diagram on the large computer screen mounted on the inner wall of the trailer. Today's test focused on the new dual ignition system.

These are deep space engines that can operate autonomously, guided by commands previously uploaded from Earth. The flight control computer is the ultimate operator of the engine. A blue-green flame ejected from the 0.38-inch nozzle of the propeller, knocking a group of fine ice particles from the LOX (liquid oxygen) pipeline into the vacuum chamber. The secret room is open. These are just ignition tests, so there is no need to copy the space environment.

The green color in the flame means that some metal has burned; methane/LOX flames are usually a clear blue hue. The next test burned more clearly, and the next test produced a deeper blue. The test is almost indistinguishable, but adjustments have been made in each of Morehead and his team to find secret recipes for pressure, temperature, and fuel-oxidant mixture to make the lander land safely. The speed and strength of the thruster during ignition are critical to the RCS engine, and the RCS engine must respond immediately to accurately control the spacecraft.

The use of methane is novel. When Nova-C launches, it will be the first lunar spacecraft to use an engine powered by the reaction of liquid oxygen and liquid methane. Current vehicles use "self-igniting" fuels, such as monomethylhydrazine, which will ignite immediately when combined with dinitrogen tetroxide, so it has a good impact, but it is also toxic. Although this is not the main reason Morehead settled on methane, one advantage is that it can be made on Mars using components from the atmosphere and underground ice.

This type of engine "never flew in space, so this is our chance to prove that it is risk-free," Morehead said. The main engine of Nova-C will slow down the speed of the aircraft, while the RCS engine controls its direction. Both need to work precisely to translate automated system commands into immediate actions during landing.

"When we land on the moon, we hope that the probability of a successful landing within a 300-meter circle is 99%," Altemus said. "Then, after initially determining the landing site, we will check the area for boulders and rocks that might endanger our safe landing."

Another 2022 CLPS lander, Astrobotic's Peregrine, uses a vision system for navigation, but also reflects laser pulses from the surface during the descent to measure its speed and avoid danger. The company developed the system under a NASA contract dating back to 2014 and tested it on a lander built by the small company Masten Space Systems in Mojave, California. (See "The land is here!" February/March 2020.)

Since Nova-C only uses visual image processing for landing, there are limitations. Just as the optical bomb sight cannot work on the water due to the lack of landmarks, the dark surface of the moon will not give the spacecraft any clues about its specific location. "We must be in certain light conditions to reach the moon," Altemus said. "We have relaxed the requirements for landing on the moon anytime, anywhere. These requirements will get you into trouble."

Staff with NASA experience have made a gesture in the general direction of the Johnson Center, where "good enough" is equivalent to "unacceptable." Here, it is different, insisting on the "new space" spirit of "building, flying and evolving along the way".

"When I was at NASA, we wrote down every request we could think of before the first purchase, so they could bid as closely as possible," Altemus said. "Why do we write ourselves into these requirements, and then it is difficult to change them, and does not give the contractor any flexibility? Here, we can build an imperfect lander that can land on the moon. Before we land on the moon Later, [we] perfected it over and over again."

Intuitive Machines plans to use Nova-C to fly to the moon while developing Nova-D. Nova-D will have the ability to bring 1,100 pounds to the surface of the moon.

For engineers and executives who are accustomed to watching this technology develop at an extremely rapid rate, the rapid development of products and markets is exciting. "This is the most interesting time in my career," Altemus said.

Veterans enjoy the freedom of business transfer, while young employees look forward to a brighter future. Many of them said that they will be responsible for overseeing the exploration and utilization of the solar system.

"The moon is the gateway to further destinations," said William Amtmann, a 22-year-old mechanical engineer. Testing IM's engines was his first full-time job in the aerospace industry. "This opens up a whole new field."

Getting a place in the lunar market means being ahead of other emerging competitors, many of which also hold NASA contracts. The nine companies that initially signed commercial lunar payload services (CLPS) contracts are eligible to bid for future NASA mission orders, and five more companies will join in 2020.

Everyone involved hopes that NASA will provide a sufficiently diverse payload size to give many of them the opportunity to fly. Astrobotic will launch NASA's Volatile Substance Survey Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) to the south pole of the moon for a 100-day mission to search for water ice at the end of 2023.

The $199.5 million task order is a major victory for one of CLPS's original competitors. Compared with the commercial birth of IM in 2018, Astrobotic has been in business for 14 years. The Peregrine lander is expected to hitchhiker with other payloads on the Vulcan Centaur launch system in 2022, which will replace Atlas and Delta rockets. But the delay of the BE-4 engine provided by Blue Origin may lead to the selection of a new launch supplier, just like the Europa Clippers mission.

Another mission, IM-2, is scheduled to send the first lander to the lunar south pole in December 2022. IM's Nova-C will carry Polar Resourced Ice Mining Experiment-1, the first ever moon ice drill and a rover to prove that 4G communication can work on the moon. In July 2021, IM and its partner Arizona State University won another victory and won the NASA Tipping Point contract worth 41.6 million U.S. dollars to operate a "funnel lander" on the moon during IM-2. Deployed from Nova-C, this Micro-Nova will inspect craters deep in the moon. The data from the optical imager of the Mars rover is a boon for any future lunar ice miner.

If private companies, universities, and research institutions can pool their resources, the moon will be close at hand. This may help IM’s former NASA staff to avoid repeating their fate at the space agency, where shifting funding priorities leaves them idle. The ultimate way to prevent this reversal is to perform a private mission to the moon. IM does just that. In August, it announced that it would lease space on IM-2, its second moon landing program sponsored by NASA. Four customers will carry IM-2's Falcon 9 rocket.

Perhaps more commercially ambitious is IM's attempt to dominate the private sector in the field of lunar communications. The Nova-C of IM-2 will launch a York Space System satellite into lunar orbit to provide bandwidth for education and private sector customers.

This will not happen until the liquid oxygen/liquid methane engine is perfected.

This is what IM did at Ellington Stadium on this day in January 2020. This is a long day. Homemade sandwiches are taken from the bag. The only bathroom is a bucket with plastic seats. The main engine never fires. Workers flocked to replace the valve and clean the pipeline.

It seems that there is too much water in the oxygen supply and the ice is blocking the valve. The process of finding a new supplier was an unwelcome but small setback and will begin the next day.

The performance of the RCS test is much better and can be ignited dozens of times. Each short burst will provide data on engine performance and provide it to the software team for landing simulations. Even before the sun sets, the temperature will drop. The busy and frustrating day is over, but the drudgery of packing up the equipment is yet to come. The cables were rewound and stored, the umbilical cord was disconnected, and the tent was blown away in the current strong wind.

This is the shortcoming of the mobile test bench operation, and there will be dozens of them. In October 2021, project manager Vajdos contacted by phone when he was refueling for the 57th Heat test in two and a half years, and IM was building a "flame range." Essentially, this is a bunker that allows engine testing on a mobile test bench inside its wall instead of running to the abandoned taxiway that was tested in January last year.

As the January 2020 test drew to a close, the moon cleared the horizon and blur of the Earth’s atmosphere, and is now shining in the evening sky, almost full moon. Workers’ eyes tend to flicker while working. If they need any motivation, they are beckoning.

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Joe Pappalardo is a journalist based in southern Texas. He is the author of the non-fiction book Spaceport Earth; Hell; Sunflowers: The Secret History, and the upcoming red day morning. Joe-Paparado.com.

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