cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/15122127
Context: https://spacenews.com/im-1-lunar-lander-tipped-over-on-its-side/
Joking aside, it’s still pretty impressive. Landing on the moon is not easy. They landed softly, and the payloads are healthy, so overall I’d consider it a win.
Not precisely defense, and perhaps a bit too credible, but I thought some folks here might enjoy this. Feel free to remove if it doesn’t fit the community. Cheers!
Isn’t this the second lander that’s fallen on it’s face recently?
There have been a several lunar landing attempts recently. ispace (🇯🇵) crashed, Roscosmos (🇷🇺) crashed, ISRO (🇮🇳) landed upright, Astrobotic (🇺🇲) didn’t make it to the moon, JAXA (🇯🇵) landed upsidedown, and now Intuitive Machines (🇺🇲) landed sideways. Moon landings are difficult.
How did they land 2 big ugly bags of mostly water on it, complete with golf clubs and a small car, without flipping, then get them back into lunar orbit? It seems like the deep pool of engineering expertise has dried up somewhat over the decades. Was it just luck and vast amounts of money relative to GDP?
The bags did the steering.
It’s the money. Just at a surface level, if you compare the rockets that launched these missions (falcon 9, H-IIA, LVM3, Soyuz), theres just a lot less mass being sent to the moon with these landers, which means less margin for error. Apollo 11 was also predated by 10 test launches, including a full on dress rehearsal where they intentionally did the whole mission except the last 15 km of descent. Apollo also allowed itself to rely on human pilots to deal with the difficult problem of flying and landing a craft unlike any other in an environment unlike any other, which these machines have to do autonomously
Good point, I didn’t know about the dress rehearsals! Fascinating stuff.
There was a significant amount of manual piloting in the Apollo missions
The guidance gets more difficult in the terminal stages and they didn’t really trust computers to safely control the spacecraft near the surface, so their solution was to have the computer fly 95% of the way down and have the crew take over for the terminal phase.
The Apollo algorithms work fine for non-manned missions as well, but you have to vet the trajectory targets more fully in simulation and add some active retargeting scheme to avoid obstacles near the surface.
Combine the added complexity of a robotic lander with groups like intuitive that have never landed one before, and this sort of thing happens
Thanks for the reply, it helped. I hope human pilots will always be indispensable for MOST Deep Blue hero stuff.
Sure thing!
Honestly I wish we didn’t have to design manned spacecraft to be manually pilotable because you have to make design sacrifices to get there. However, that is unlikely to happen in the lunar program anytime soon
I thought the Japanese tipped one over as well.
No it landed upside down.
Using the USA flag for Intuitive Machines is a tad disingenuous, they’re not a public US arm that represents the nation and it’s people, they’re just a private for profit company, same as Amazon or McDonalds.
They don’t care what country they’re in, they just go where they think they can make the most money. Right now they think that’s the USA.
They’re more than happy to cash in on American pride and nostalgia by slapping a bunch of flags all over their corporate space equipment and trying to spin this as “The first American moon landings since Apollo”, haha.
NASA paid for it, and ITAR restrictions mean they’re probably pretty dang American.
The Japanese one somehow landed upside down, literally upside down, engine pointing up, undamaged from the landing! Now that’s impressive!
One of its thruster bells broke off during final descent causing a loss of that thrust which threw the whole thing out of whack, it corrected admirably but landed upside down haha.
Such a weird cool turn of events. Space is so cool.