178. Saving Odie: A team of space geeks, a scrappy lunar lander and today’s hackable space race

Summary

Saving Odie: Overcoming Last-Minute Crisis in the Hackable Space Race

Introduction to Odysseus Lunar Lander (Odie)

In Episode 178 of Click Here, titled "Saving Odie: A team of space geeks, a scrappy lunar lander and today’s hackable space race," host Dina Temple-Raston delves into the high-stakes mission of the Odysseus Lunar Lander, affectionately nicknamed "Odie." As she introduces the mission, Dina sets the stage for a story of innovation, crisis management, and the emerging vulnerabilities in modern space exploration.

Mission Significance and Background

The Odysseus mission marks a significant milestone for NASA and the private aerospace company Intuitive Machines. This mission represents the first American spacecraft to land on the Moon since Apollo 17 and the first private-led lunar landing. Tim Crane, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Intuitive Machines, provides personal insights into the mission's importance and his long-standing passion for space exploration.

Tim Crane [01:13]: "And then that kind of morphed into, as the hours got longer and the sleep got shorter, a scrappy little dude."

Growing up in the 1970s, Crane was inspired by iconic space events, such as watching a Space Shuttle landing from his father's office building. This early fascination eventually led him to a career in aerospace engineering, culminating in the creation of Odie.

The Crisis: Altimeter Failure

As the mission progressed smoothly, a critical issue emerged mere hours before the planned lunar landing. Crane recounts the moment of crisis:

Tim Crane [02:15]: "We've got maybe six or seven hours before landing."

Crane's business partner delivered alarming news: the laser altimeters, essential for measuring Odie's distance from the lunar surface, were malfunctioning. The absence of accurate altitude data posed a severe risk, potentially resulting in Odie either running out of fuel or crashing onto the Moon.

Tim Crane [09:17]: "Houston, we have a problem."

The Team's Response: Hacking the Navigation System

Faced with limited time and dwindling fuel, the Intuitive Machines team embarked on a frantic effort to salvage the mission. Crane describes the urgency and collaborative spirit in the control center:

Tim Crane [05:18]: "It was kind of this really strange pressure relief knowing that you just had to wait."

Amid the scramble, the team discovered that Odie was carrying a Doppler Lidar sensor—an experiment intended for NASA's navigation testing. Realizing its potential, they devised a plan to repurpose the sensor to replace the faulty altimeters. This required a rapid overhaul of Odie's navigation software:

Tim Crane [14:24]: "Rewrite the software. In other words, hack it."

The engineers worked tirelessly, fueled by caffeine and determination, to integrate the Doppler Lidar measurements into Odie's navigation system. Their efforts culminated in a high-stakes reboot of the navigation system, essentially a last-ditch hack to ensure a safe landing.

Successful Landing and Implications

As Odie approached the Moon, the team held their breath. The moment of truth arrived when the lander initiated its modified navigation sequence. After a tense wait, communication was restored:

Tim Crane [16:38]: "I gotta tell you, the visual odometry performance that we were seeing on our consoles was better than we'd ever seen in testing. It was making measurements, it was updating the onboard state all by itself. It was just working perfectly."

Odie successfully landed on the lunar south pole, marking a historic achievement for Intuitive Machines and NASA. However, this success also underscored the inherent cybersecurity vulnerabilities in modern space missions. The ability to "hack" into a spacecraft's systems to save a mission, while heroic in this instance, raises concerns about potential malicious cyber threats.

Dina Temple-Raston [17:05]: "This entire scenario illustrates just how easy it might be to hack a space mission."

Conclusion: The New Frontier of Cybersecurity in Space

The episode concludes by highlighting the dual-edged sword of advanced, computer-reliant space exploration. While technological innovations enable remarkable achievements, they also open the door to cybersecurity risks that could jeopardize missions.

Dina Temple-Raston [17:29]: "Space is the new Wild west, you know there are no international regulations."

As space becomes increasingly accessible, the need for robust cybersecurity measures in space missions becomes paramount. The successful rescue of Odie serves as both a testament to human ingenuity and a cautionary tale about the fragility of our ventures beyond Earth.

Key Takeaways

• Odie's Mission: The first private-led lunar landing since Apollo 17, highlighting the collaborations between NASA and private aerospace companies.
• Crisis Management: Overcoming a last-minute technical failure through innovative hacking and repurposing existing technology.
• Cybersecurity Concerns: The episode emphasizes the growing vulnerabilities in space missions due to their reliance on computer systems, urging the industry to prioritize cybersecurity measures.

Notable Quotes

• Tim Crane [01:13]: "A scrappy little dude."
• Tim Crane [09:17]: "Houston, we have a problem."
• Tim Crane [14:24]: "Rewrite the software. In other words, hack it."
• Tim Crane [16:38]: "It was just working perfectly."
• Dina Temple-Raston [17:05]: "This entire scenario illustrates just how easy it might be to hack a space mission."

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By presenting a narrative that intertwines personal passion, technical challenges, and broader cybersecurity implications, Episode 178 of Click Here offers a comprehensive and engaging exploration of modern space missions' complexities and vulnerabilities.

Transcript

[Dena Temple Rest]

From Recorded Future News, I'm Dena Temple Rest, and this is click here. 4, 3, 2, 1, ignition.

[Tim Crane]

And liftoff. Go SpaceX, go IM1.

[Dena Temple Rest]

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]

You know, I can't say for sure. We early on kind of said, this spacecraft's a fighter.

[Dena Temple Rest]

This is Tim Crane. He's the co founder and chief technology officer at Intuitive Machines.

[Tim Crane]

And then that kind of morphed into, as the hours got longer and the sleep got shorter, a scrappy little dude.

[Dena Temple Rest]

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]

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]

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.

[Tim Crane]

Now, two and a half minutes before the launch of Apollo 13, test conductor told the astronauts, good luck, head for the hill. Apollo 17 is finally on its way to the moon. Space Shuttle Challenger liftoff. From a freezing cold Florida to the chairs of the.

[Dena Temple Rest]

By 1972, NASA's Apollo program had landed a dozen astronauts on the moon. Then there was Skylab, America's first space station.

[Tim Crane]

The first crew of Skylab astronauts returned safely to Earth.

[Dena Temple Rest]

And that was followed by the Voyager missions which flew to Jupiter and Saturn to take these spectacular pictures, to extend man's senses farther into the solar system than ever before. So for Tim Crane, coming of age in the 70s and 80s, space wasn't just some light on a far off field. It was a really visceral thing. Like the time he watched the space shuttle land on a carrier from the roof of his dad's office building.

[Tim Crane]

My dad had an office at the end of the Runway in Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City, Louisiana. And we had an opportunity to go climb on the roof of one of the buildings in his office complex. And we saw the space shuttle come in and land on its carrier and it flew right over our heads. And it was like an electric shock ran through my body and I knew that I was going to work. You know, I was probably 10 years old. I was going to work either on planes or spacecraft or starships or warp drives or Something that was what I was going to do.

[Dena Temple Rest]

All of this is to say that Tim Crane's personal space odyssey, well, it seemed kind of destined. He became an engineer, started a space company, became part of NASA's latest commercial space program, something known as Artemis. Then this year, Tim and his team at Intuitive Machines found themselves trying to help OD make history from their mission control center in Houston.

[Tim Crane]

Our control center is round. It looks a lot more like a. Maybe like a submarine command center, right. With a table in the middle. We're all facing outwards on our screens. There is a big screen on one wall that we can look at for kind of a situational awareness.

[Dena Temple Rest]

Three, two, one, ignition.

[Tim Crane]

You kind of watch it counting down and you go, this is. This is really going to happen. You know, we're about to be on our way to the moon. And I was holding my breath in the next room, kind of watching the screens and watching them as this all played out.

[Dena Temple Rest]

And at this point, after years of preparation and test after test this late in the process, Tim said whatever came next was kind of out of his hands.

[Tim Crane]

When you do any great endeavor, when you come to the point that you actually are doing it, if you've prepared, you realize that the real test was all the preparation. And so whether you're doing a musical performance or an athletic competition, it's really the culmination of all the things that led to that moment.

[Dena Temple Rest]

And now, well, it was game time.

[Tim Crane]

Yeah. Pulse rate went up for sure.

[Dena Temple Rest]

Odie hitched a ride out of the Earth's atmosphere on the back of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. And then when the Falcon 9 released it, Odie drifted out into space on its own, headed for the moon.

[Tim Crane]

Those beautiful pictures then of Odie separating and coasting off from the Falcon 9 upper stage. What a sight. And that just, you know, it's indelibly marked in my memory forever.

[Dena Temple Rest]

And what's the feeling that you have? Is it love? Is it. What is it?

[Tim Crane]

You know, it's. It's hard to describe. Like, even right now, I want to jump up and pump my fist in the air and just go, yeah. It brings a tingle.

[Dena Temple Rest]

Odie was supposed to orbit a few times so the team on Earth could prepare everything ahead of a landing. And that's when Tim's partner came into the control room with some news. He said essentially that iconic Apollo 13 line.

[Tim Crane]

Houston, we have a problem.

[Dena Temple Rest]

He told Tim, there's a problem with the laser altimeter, essentially an instrument that helps him gauge how far Odie is from the surface. Of the moon.

[Tim Crane]

The altimeter is really important because if you're a little bit high, you're going to run out of fuel. If you're a little bit low, you could potentially smash into the moon and, you know, then that's it, you crash.

[Dena Temple Rest]

Game over. So at its most basic level, the laser altimeter on ODI measured distance by shooting a laser beam at the surface of the moon. Then, based on the time it took to reflect back, it does a calculation that tells the team on Earth how far OD is from the surface.

[Tim Crane]

There's a clock that says, fire the laser now. The photons shoot out from it, they hit the moon, they come back and they trigger a detector. And then it stops the clock like a stopwatch. And it goes, I got the return. And based on that time, it goes, well, I know the speed of light, so this is how far away the thing you're looking at in this case, the surface of the moon is.

[Dena Temple Rest]

If it's off, it'd be like thinking you were three feet from the car next to you on the freeway when you're only three inches. That won't end well. And this is exactly what his partner was telling him now.

[Tim Crane]

And, you know, he asked me, what do you think the probability of landing safely is? I said, not much, because we really need. We need to know how high we are to safely execute the landing sequence.

[Dena Temple Rest]

So the team starts scrambling and everybody.

[Tim Crane]

You know, pouring one more cup of coffee, scratching their chin, looking at whiteboards, scribbling on paper, just racking our brains for what we might do.

[Dena Temple Rest]

They were frantically trying to inventory everything they'd used to build Odie to see if they could repurpose it and maybe jerry rigged something on board to help them land.

[Tim Crane]

You know, is there something I could do with the radio signal? Could I. Could I modify what we're doing with the cameras?

[Dena Temple Rest]

Then it dawned on Tim. Wait. We have a lot more than ODIE components on board. When we come back, saving Odie chatgpt AI Machines Satellite engine ignition. Click here and lift off.

[Tim Crane]

Hi, everyone, it's Michael Calorie, director of Consumer Tech and Culture at Wired. Here with my colleagues, senior writer Lauren Good.

[Dena Temple Rest]

Hello.

[Tim Crane]

And Wired contributor Zoe Schiffer.

[Dena Temple Rest]

Hey.

[Tim Crane]

We're here to tell you about our new podcast, Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.

[Dena Temple Rest]

Every week, we get together to talk about how technology and culture from the Valley is influencing our everyday lives. We dig into questions like, will we ever get our Privacy back? Is OpenAI for real? And how are Silicon Valley billionaires impacting US elections. The first episode of Uncanny Valley comes out on October 31st. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Before the break, Odie was making extra orbits around the moon. As Tim and the team were scrambling to figure out a way to land a spacecraft without an altimeter. The clock was ticking. Odie had limited fuel. And on top of all that, the lander was about to disappear around the backside of the moon, where its signal would temporarily go out until it rounded back again. This is when Tim had an epiphany. OD wasn't just landing on the moon on its own. It was carrying experiments, half a dozen of them, that were supposed to start once OD landed. And Tim thought, what if there was something in one of those that they could use? So the team started frantically inventorying them.

[Tim Crane]

A sensor that NASA had been working on in space. Navigation sensor electronics, she thinks. Laser reflector array.

[Dena Temple Rest]

And in this mix of experiments, they found something that just might work. A kind of navigation system NASA had wanted to test in space, something called a Doppler lidar.

[Tim Crane]

It has three lasers on it that measure the Doppler shift in the lasers so that it can directly measure velocity with respect to the surface. So it's different from our optical system.

[Dena Temple Rest]

But it might do the trick. It's slightly less accurate, but a slightly less accurate measurement was better than nothing at all. The NASA administrators gave the nod for them to use it for landing, and their scramble began anew to turn something that happened to be riding inside Odie into a vital part of ODI itself.

[Tim Crane]

Since we already had those Doppler measurements piped into our navigation system, we figured how we could rewrite the software to also take the range measurements in.

[Dena Temple Rest]

Rewrite the software. In other words, hack it. Not to break it so much as to make it do something a little different than it was intended to do. And the hack would essentially give OD some new commands. It would tell it, hey, get your location reading from this LiDAR that happens to be on board instead of your regular altimeter. Engineers might normally spend weeks on this kind of coding project, but in this case, they only had a fraction of that time.

[Tim Crane]

We had two orbits to go. Each orbit's about two hours, so we're about four hours from landing.

[Dena Temple Rest]

So Tim had one team doing a lot of math to convert the Doppler measurements into something that Odie would understand. And then he had this other team rewriting navigation code so Odie could interpret this new way of measuring some trigonometry and the right hand rule two Hours passed and you can imagine the scene. The coders chugging coffee in Red Bull, typing like Odi's life depended on it. Unfortunately, the only way to see if their hack actually worked was to completely turn off the navigation system and then just hope that when it came back online, the new code had installed.

[Tim Crane]

We worked through the procedure to shut the navigation system off, to bring it back up and reboot it.

[Dena Temple Rest]

So they turned off the system and waited. The reboot was still processing when Odie slipped behind the moon and the signal went down. So as communication to Odie died, they still had no idea if their plan had worked.

[Tim Crane]

And that was surreal because there's nothing we could do. There was, there was no more modifications to make. We can't talk to the vehicle anymore. It was kind of this really strange pressure relief knowing that you just had to wait.

[Dena Temple Rest]

Tim and his team were holding their breath and then their consoles lit up. It's alive, it's alive, it's alive. Odie was back, even better than they'd expected.

[Tim Crane]

I gotta tell you, the visual odometry performance that we were seeing on our consoles was better than we'd ever seen in testing. It was making measurements, it was updating the onboard state all by itself. It was just working perfectly.

[Dena Temple Rest]

The control room erupted in cheers.

[Tim Crane]

Altitude of 10 km downrange 1100 km -5 minute deadpans DEPOS terrain relative navigation measurements.

[Dena Temple Rest]

Though as the crew watched, something felt off. The surface of the moon seemed to be closing in really fast.

[Tim Crane]

We were coming in fast. We were probably a couple hundred meters lower than we anticipated.

[Dena Temple Rest]

Tim watched on the monitor as Odie was firing its engines to try to slow the descent. A hundred meters to go. 80 meters, 70 meters, 50 meters, 30.

[Tim Crane]

Meters over the landing site. And then we contacted the ground. We hit hard.

[Dena Temple Rest]

And then after what felt like a really long time, the announcement came.

[Tim Crane]

Houston, Odysseus has found his new home.

[Dena Temple Rest]

They'd done it. They figured out how to save the mission with some very well placed computer code, which on the one hand was amazing news for Odi, but on the other hand highlights a significant vulnerability. This entire scenario illustrates just how easy it might be to hack a space mission. The very thing, space experts say, casts a pall over the whole enterprise. So when you make a massive space mission, the big line item is not, oh, someone should go look at cybersecurity. Frankly, there's not a lot of people who know anything about cybersecurity of space systems. In order to actually enable that capability, the OD mission might well have had a completely different ending if they hadn't been able to hack into the lander's navigation system. And while in this case the hackers were hired and overseen by mission control, imagine for a moment if the person on the other end of the keyboard hadn't been trying to save the mission, but instead was trying to make it fail. Experts worry that these cutting edge missions are vulnerable to the very same cybersecurity threats computer networks are facing here on Earth. Space is the new Wild west, you know there are no international regulations. That's next time. Unclick here. Here are some of the top cyber and intelligence stories of the past week.

[C]

The Nigerian government's dropping all money laundering charges against Tigran Gabriel By Rianne he's an executive of Binance Holdings Ltd.

[Dena Temple Rest]

Some good news out of Nigeria for regular listeners of Click Here. You've heard our reporting since February on the detention of a Binance executive named Tigran Gambarian. Nigerian authorities charged him with money laundering and tax evasion and then unexpectedly dropped the charges this week on what they said was medical grounds. Gambarian landed in the US On Friday. At the irs, Gambarian pioneered techniques that allowed government investigators to track illegal cryptocurrency transactions, and he helped take down a roster of dark web markets. He later took a job with Binance to help eradicate illicit activity on the company's exchange. Officials close to the case told Click Here that Gambarian's worsening health played a role in his release. The future of Georgia is at stake and its aftermath. Will Georgia become a Russian satellite? Or can the pro European movement that is the only answer for Georgia's future prevail? The homes of two prominent disinformation researchers were raided by Georgian authorities in Tbilisi on Thursday, ahead of the country's parliamentary elections. Both researchers work with the Digital Forensic Research Lab, an initiative led by a US Based think tank that exposes online disaster misinformation. Just a day earlier, the lab had published a report entitled Russia is directly and indirectly meddling in Georgia's upcoming election. Police searched one of the author's homes, confiscating all of her family's electronic devices. Neither researcher has been charged and the reason for the raids is still unclear. Last week, LinkedIn was hit with a $335 million fine by Ireland's Data Protection Commission. Allegedly, the company used its members data for advertising without getting their consent first, and that's a violation of the EU's privacy laws. The data was obtained from both third party partners as well as information users gave the site. Although LinkedIn says it did nothing wrong, the company added that it was trying to bring its practices in line with the Data Protection Commission standards. The fine is one of the largest to hit a tech company for violating the gdpr. And finally, in Sweden last week, a cello playing robot took to the stage to perform a composition written by a local composer named Jacob Mulrad. And while we've all heard of self playing pianos and drum machines, nothing like this has ever been done with a bowed string instrument. The robot is basically just two arms made of 3D printed parts and a computer brain. It was developed by researcher and composer Frederick Grahn. Its very existence is meant to challenge the audience's old world perceptions about technology in classical music, but let's be honest, it's no yo yo Mark.

[C]

Today's episode was produced by Megan Dietrich, Sean Powers, Erica Gaida and me, Jade Abdul Malik. It was edited by Karen Duffin, Back checked by Darren Ancrum, and contains original music by Ben Loving with some other music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley and our illustrator is Megan Goff. Martin Peralta is our sound designer and engineer. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News. Tune in on Friday for Mic Drop, which features our favorite interview of the week. We'll have a new episode of Click Here on Tuesday. We'll see you then.

[Tim Crane]

If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up the day's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to TheRecord Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.