Transcript
Dena Temple Rest (0:01)
From Recorded Future News, I'm Dena Temple Rest, and this is click here. 4, 3, 2, 1, ignition.
Tim Crane (0:14)
And liftoff. Go SpaceX, go IM1.
Dena Temple Rest (0:18)
And the Odysseus Lunar Lander. Earlier this year, NASA did something that it hadn't done in 52. Two years. It sent a spacecraft to the moon. Stage one propulsion is nominal. The lunar lander they sent up into space had a name, Odysseus, as in Homer's Iliad. Though, as you'll hear, Intuitive Machines, the relatively small Houston aerospace company that created it, had lots of nicknames for this robotic explorer. Odie. Scrappy little dude. So are you the one who called Odie a scrappy little dude, or was that someone else?
Tim Crane (0:59)
You know, I can't say for sure. We early on kind of said, this spacecraft's a fighter.
Dena Temple Rest (1:07)
This is Tim Crane. He's the co founder and chief technology officer at Intuitive Machines.
Tim Crane (1:13)
And then that kind of morphed into, as the hours got longer and the sleep got shorter, a scrappy little dude.
Dena Temple Rest (1:19)
Odie looks a little like a British phone booth. Or for Doctor who fans, the TARDIS time machine on six legs. And that's your spaceship. It's called the Tardis Time and Relative Dimension in Space. The idea was for Odie to travel some 250,000 miles, first atop a SpaceX rocket and then, after releasing itself from the Elon Musk Mobile, Odie would begin orbiting the moon under its own power until it eventually plopped itself down on the lunar south pole. If it worked, it would be a mission of firsts. The first time since Apollo 17 that an American spacecraft landed on the moon, and the first time that a private American company, not just NASA, would be behind it. But just hours before all this was supposed to happen, Tim's business partner came in the room with a deeply worried look on his face.
Tim Crane (2:15)
We've got maybe six or seven hours before landing, and then my partner comes in, he goes, hey, Tim, the laser altimeters aren't going to fire. And the blood just drained from my face.
Dena Temple Rest (2:32)
And all you need to know is that without an altimeter, which told the crew on the ground how high Odie was, it'd be pretty difficult to land. When people first started going to the moon, if something went wrong, you had to find something on board to help you fix it physically. But these days, with so much of space travel run on computers, you can fix just about anything from Earth by tweaking some code and sending up some new instructions, which is very good news until it isn't from recorded future News. I'm Dina Temple Reston and this is Click Here. A podcast about all things cyber and intelligence. We tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. And today, a story about a scrappy little lunar lander, a team of space geeks, and one of the things that will make modern space exploration different from what's come before it. This space race is hackable, so you don't necessarily need to have phenomenal space capabilities in order to be able to break these space systems with cyber capabilities. Stay with us. Do nice guys really finish last? I'm Tim Harford, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast and I'm exploring that very question. Join me for for my new miniseries on the art of fairness. From New York to Tahiti, we'll examine villains undone by their villainy, monstrous self devouring egos, and accounts of the extraordinary power of decency. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts from. Recorded future News. This is Click Here. I'm Dina Temple. If you grew up in the 1970s like Tim Crane did, you'd have a hard time ignoring space time.