Intuitive Machines: The Future is HERE

July 2nd, 2019

Steve Altemus hoists the lightweight long range drone coming off the drone production line at Ellington Airport. Photography by MoonBridge Media

Intuitive Machines’ 12 foot high Nova-C lunar lander model. Photography by MoonBridge Media

By Rick Clapp

Intuitive Machines is an incredibly unique space and aviation company located on the Space Port Facility at Ellington Field in Houston. The company was founded in 2013 by president and CEO Steve Altemus with the goal of bringing decades of human spaceflight know-how, technology advances, and innovative thinking into low-cost solutions aimed at serving the complex needs of our world. Since then, Altemus has steered the company back to his passion, space, with the objective of taking the space business to new frontiers.

Steve Altemus started his journey into space and aviation as a student at the Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, where he originally wanted to pursue a career as an aviator. A few years later, he graduated with an Aeronautical Engineering Degree and later earned a Masters Degree from the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Inside the mobile command center for lunar propolsion testing. Photography by MoonBridge Media

Upon graduating from Embry Riddle, he soon found himself up the coast of Florida at the Kennedy Space Center. That’s where Altemus’ career took off into space. After several years at the Kennedy Space center he was promoted to manage the space shuttle launch countdown. He directed the many successful shuttle operations over the years and then unfortunately the Columbia Shuttle disaster occurred. Altemus was assigned to reconstruct over 85,000 pieces of the shuttle. For his efforts in completing this arduous task , he was promoted by NASA to head the engineering directorate at the Johnson Space Center culminating with a position as deputy director of the Johnson Space Center. After 25 incredible years with NASA, Altemus had the desire to revolutionize the space business and he founded Intuitive Machines.

“At Intuitive Machines, we take ideas from concept to completion. We engineer systems starting from concept, through design and development, build and test.” Altemus says.
Intuitive Machines has three major areas of specialization, Aviation, Space Systems, and Additive Manufacturing and Generative Design. They all work in unison to produce outstanding engineering wonders.

Well-deserved congratulations go to Altemus and his team of nearly 90 employees and interns, for earning the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract as one of the first US companies to provide commercial services to the Moon. As part of NASA’s Artemis Program, Intuitive Machines will land NASA-provided payloads on the surface of the Moon to conduct science investigations and demonstrate advanced technologies, paving the way for astronauts to land successfully on the moon by 2024.

Intuitive Machines accomplished this tremendous feat in less than six years, which is nothing but remarkable.

“It is incredibly exciting and coincidental that 50 years ago Houston landed Apollo 11 on the lunar surface and this year, Houston-based

Intuitive Machines was awarded the contract to return NASA to the moon. We look forward to developing our systems and flying our missions to the moon from where it all started right here in Houston,” Altemus said.

On a personal note, Steve Altemus is a wonderful family man, married to his wife, Brunella, for over 30 years. His daughter, Dr. Samantha, is a resident veterinarian and internist at OSU. His son Joseph is a mechanical engineer who builds robots for Jacobs Engineering.

Houston we do not have a problem, Intuitive Machines is taking US back to the moon!!

Thanks to the pioneer spirit of the people at NASA and the talented, creative contractor Intuitive Machines, we will continue further our space travels to the Moon, Mars and beyond. God Bless America.

Altemus shows the inside of their 3D printer where stainless steel engine parts are built. Photography by MoonBridge Media

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NASA History Overview

November 1st, 2018

A new era in space flight began on April 12, 1981, when Space Shuttle Columbia, or STS-1, soared into orbit from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is responsible for unique scientific and technological achievements in human spaceflight, aeronautics, space science, and space applications that have had widespread impacts on our nation and the world.

Forged in response to early Soviet space achievements, NASA was built on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and other government organizations, as the locus of U.S. civil aerospace research and development.

When NASA opened for business on Oct. 1, 1958, it accelerated the work already started on human and robotic spaceflight. NASA’s first high profile program was Project Mercury, an effort to learn if humans could survive in space. This was followed by Project Gemini, which used spacecraft built for two astronauts to perfect the capabilities needed for the national objective of a human trip to the Moon by the end of the 1960s.

Project Apollo achieved that objective in July 1969 with the Apollo 11 mission and expanded on it with five more successful lunar landing missions through 1972. After the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz Test Projects of the mid-1970s, NASA’s human spaceflight efforts again resumed in 1981 with the Space Shuttle program that continued for 30 years. The shuttle was not only a breakthrough technology, but was essential to our next major step in space, the construction of the International Space Station.

Over the last 60 years NASA has continued to push the boundaries with cutting edge aeronautics research that has dramatically changed the way we build and fly airplanes. NASA has also completed the reconnaissance of our solar system, with intense investigation of all the planets. Using orbital spacecraft like the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA has also dramatically changed our understanding of the universe around us, as well as our own planet.

NASA’s early work on launch vehicles, communication satellites, and weather satellites has fundamentally changed daily life and created whole new industries. As a catalyst for international cooperation, NASA has also changed how and why humanity conducts space exploration. Now, NASA is preparing to take humankind farther than ever before, as it helps to foster a robust commercial space economy near Earth, and pioneers further human and robotic exploration as we venture into deep space.

The NASA History Office Program publishes a quarterly newsletter, as well as an array of books (print and digital), hosts social media, provides fellowships, and runs the Historical Reference Collection (our version of an archive) to assist the public in finding more information on aeronautical and space history. In addition, the staff produces the Aeronautics and Space Report of the President.

The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 directs NASA to produce an annual report that includes a “comprehensive description of the programmed activities and the accomplishments of all agencies of the United States in the field of aeronautics and space activities” during the preceding year.

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