Alongside giants in commercial space operations—like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin—are a handful of smaller companies NASA has hired to help it maintain U.S. dominance in space.Texas Monthly’s September cover story details a competition between two of these startups, Firefly Aerospace, based in Cedar Park, and Intuitive Machines in Houston.More than a half century after Apollo 11, these private companies are battling it out to develop cheaper, more modern technology to reach the moon. They’re key to NASA’s plans for the future of lunar exploration.The author of that story, Joe Pappalardo, is this week’s guest on TM Out Loud. He’s the author of Spaceport Earth: The Reinvention of Spaceflight, and he’s written for Texas Monthly about the new private industry growing here…