DAWN HAS DUST 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. 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. "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 vehicles pull through the gate, pause at the security checkpoint, and continue to an abandoned taxiway. Large yellow X's painted on the asphalt indicate that the taxiway is defunct. The staff parks the test stand more than 30 feet from the command trailer and begins the now-familiar process of preparing the rig to fire.
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