Shooting for the moon with Steve Altemus of Intuitive Machines

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 December 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our modern way of life requires more resources than ever before — resources that are becoming increasingly scarce and environmentally taxing to extract.

Intuitive Machines co-founder and CEO Steve Altemus believes a solution to this problem could be waiting in the cosmos.

This week on How I Built This Lab, Steve breaks down the logistics and economics of sending the first-ever commercial spacecraft to the moon. Plus, an overview of today’s newfound global space race, and how Steve embraces failure as part of working on hard technological problems.

This episode was produced by Carla Esteves with music by Ramtin Arablouei.

It was edited by John Isabella with research by Carla Esteves. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wundery Plus subscribers can listen to how I built this early and ad free right now.
0:05.0	Join Wundery Plus in the Wundery App or on Apple Podcasts.
0:10.0	Think of all the things you can do in 10 minutes or less.
0:12.0	Scroll through social media, check your bank balance. Think of all the things you can do in 10 minutes or less.
0:12.5	Scroll through social media, check your bank balance, make a sandwich.
0:16.4	Or learn about the surprising economics behind all these things.
0:20.4	The Indicid from Plan of Money is a quick hit of insight into the economics of business, work, and everyday life.
0:26.0	Every weekday in less than 10 minutes.
0:28.0	Listen now to The Indicator Podcast from NPR.
0:31.0	Hello and welcome to how I built this lab.
0:36.7	I'm Guy Raz.
0:38.2	So December 7th, 1972, that was the last time humans landed on the moon, the Apollo 17 mission.
0:47.0	Among the reasons astronauts haven't returned is because we thought we discovered most of what we needed to.
0:53.0	And the second is that it's really, really expensive.
0:58.0	But it turns out neither of these things is as true today.
1:02.0	The moon may contain vast deposits of
1:05.6	important minerals and getting to the moon could cost a fraction of the amount
1:10.1	it did adjusted for inflation of course, back in 1972.
1:15.1	Steve Altimus is an entrepreneur who wants to make all of this happen.
1:19.3	He founded a company called Intuitive Machines that that Plans to Commercialize Space Exploration, particularly on the Moon.
1:27.0	Steve spent most of his career at NASA, and while he loved it, he was also frustrated by the bureaucracy and what he felt was the lack of ambition.
1:37.0	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 the
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