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The space agency has turned to private industry to realize these ambitions, and there are now more than a dozen companies, large and small, building a new generation of robotic lunar landers. NASA’s plan to return to the moon begins with a fleet of robot landers. Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus (center) guides visitors from NASA on an August 2021 tour of his company’s headquarters in Houston. Never mind how little it may conform to our idea of what a spacecraft looks like: This dissected, road-ready test machine holds some of the hardware (and software) for what will likely be the first American craft to set down softly on the moon since the 1970s. The command trailer, another DIY creation, contains the first iteration of the lander’s flight control systems. Methane, oxygen, and nitrogen tanks stand compartmentalized behind blast walls. The main engine’s nozzle juts out the rear of the flatbed, and a vacuum chamber for reaction-control thruster testing sits next to it.
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To anyone else on the airfield, the trailer and flatbed look like a pair of random vehicles, but to the staff at Intuitive Machines they are a lunar lander called Nova-C. The staff parks the test stand more than 300 feet from the command trailer and begins the now-familiar process of preparing the rig to fire. Large yellow X’s painted on the asphalt indicate that the taxiway is defunct. The vehicles pull through the gate, pause at the security checkpoint, and continue to an abandoned taxiway. “Instead of building a $500,000 test facility somewhere remote, we bought a $16,000 truck and converted it,” says Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus. The centerpiece of the small caravan of pickup trucks and towed trailers is a flatbed with rocket engines mounted on the back-what the IM staff call their Mobile Test Stand.
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Dawn has just broken when a handful of vehicles leave the hangar doors of the Intuitive Machines (IM) production facility, ease their way into traffic, and drive to Ellington Field, an air and space facility outside Houston where the young company tests engines for a spacecraft that will land on the moon.
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