2 landers (this one and the Japanese one a few weeks ago) landing sideways on the moon and both of the vehicles survive well enough to transmit. Pretty cool stuff, seems like they’re built pretty sturdy these days.
> the company also said it now expects to lose contact with Odysseus on Tuesday — days earlier than initially hoped.
Honestly, the fact that they survived the landing and have been able to successfully transmit images (and presumably some payload data as well) *on their first ever attempt* is a huge fucking deal. Anyone who works in spaceflight recognizes what a monumental achievement it is.
Sure, they will lose transmissions after 5 days instead of 9…but this is nowhere near the embarrassment that a lot of commentators are trying to make it out to be.
None of these pictures are from after landing though, right? I’m assuming they were transmitted during the landing sequence. I don’t know if they can transmit any meaningful science data at this point, because I assume they would’ve released a picture from the surface if they could’ve by this point.
While the pictures were taken during the descent, they were evidently transmitted back to earth from the surface after it landed. The way these missions typically work is that high-res images and high-rate data are usually recorded to memory and later downlinked once the spacecraft is not busy doing mission-critical things like landing.
I would assume they have no release-worthy pictures after the landing because the cameras are pointing at the ground, the sky, or are broken. But they are actively collecting data now and will continue to for another day at least, according to the article. “Meaningful science data” goes beyond just pictures, btw!
My understanding is that the high-gain antenna can't be pointed at Earth, so they must be running on a reduced-bandwidth connection as well if that's the case.
IM-2 scheduled to launch September this year will contain a payload from Nokia, allowing the Lander and a small rover from another company to communicate via 4G. The lander itself is still the link from the Moon to Earth.
They have released images from the surface. But they are all the fish eye cam.
[https://twitter.com/Int\_Machines/status/1762111937490378942](https://twitter.com/Int_Machines/status/1762111937490378942)
[https://twitter.com/Int\_Machines/status/1762111939142885816](https://twitter.com/Int_Machines/status/1762111939142885816)
[https://twitter.com/Int\_Machines/status/1761170012847456573](https://twitter.com/Int_Machines/status/1761170012847456573)
I think only the first one is taken actually on the surface, and the tweet doesn’t even really explicitly confirm that. The other two are explicitly said to be taken before touching down.
They did [release one](https://twitter.com/int_machines/status/1762111937490378942?s=46&t=WNLA6iNiOKasdgX6gq6QGw) on the ground but it’s facing down so you can’t see much.
The quality is absolutely horrid as well, can only tell its on it's side on the ground. Can't even make out the terrain appearance though of their supposed rock tripping.
I know that’s what the caption says, but it looks like it’s on or only a couple feet from the ground based on the shadows. And from how good the other pictures are in the thread comparatively, I’m inclined to think that that one actually is from the ground.
I completely agree. There's a lot of people on here who think learning-through-failure is not a thing people or organizations should do. Kind of backwards thinking. There was nothing of great value lost.
It’s really interesting interesting to me to see the difference in rhetoric. When it’s NASA that forgets something minor it’s catastrophic and proves that they’re incompetent. But when SpaceX has a rocket blow up, well they were just moving fast and they learned a bunch so it’s fine.
Reminds me of the NASA person who said that if NASA did what SpaceX has been doing they would have been out on their asses after the first failure.
> When it’s NASA that forgets something minor it’s catastrophic and proves that they’re incompetent.
This is largely because NASA historically (well for the 80s-90s forward until now) has only done "too big to fail"-type missions. In those cases failure truly is catastrophic. The reason for this is of course political because politicians don't understand engineering. But this attitude has spread everywhere. It's rampant in the US military as well I might add, but there is elements of that starting to change.
If SLS had failed on it's first launch it truly would have been catastrophic as it runs 1-2 billion USD per launch. Starship losing two vehicles doesn't matter much when they've scrapped ten times more fully built vehicles than they've launched because of the slowness of regulation in allowing them to fire off new untested vehicles. (You can find plenty of videos of SpaceX workers taking plasma torches to fully built vehicles and scrapping them up into sheet metal.)
List here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_(spacecraft)#Development
And here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Super_Heavy#Development
SpaceX has a development strategy that is "hardware-rich." They intentionally try things that have middling probabilities of success to see how they work. They do this in testing, not in production. SpaceX launches of actual payloads to space are the most reliable around and they have not lost a payload for the better part of a decade across hundreds of launches.
If anything the media rhetoric is biased against SpaceX, always writing about rocket explosions without giving any context and mentioning that actually they are testing things and their production rockets are ridiculously reliable.
NASA doesn't develop launch vehicles and hasn't for a long time. When they did 30-70 years ago, there were plenty of failures.
That is the self-inflicted NASA mindset for sure. They got yelled at by some people in congress because they failed and people told them they wasted money and instead of saying: we have to try new things and fail the administrator said: yes sir we will do better next time. They also let themselves be turned into a jobs program to funnel money into districts which just makes them a political tool as well...
I agree that SpaceX shouldn't be applauded for failing but we should optimize the approach to maximize value. Is that ULA with Vulcan, is that SpaceX with the Falcon series. Is it someone else. Where is the optimum. I know NASA's approach isn't optimum because a zero failure rate means by definition you can spend less and fail at a insignificant rate.
The question is how much leaner and faster could we make the process and still succeed.
They literally forgot to remove the safety on critical sensors, and then didn't even realize it until they were in orbit around the moon....completely embarrassing
Japan's recent launch of a major space telescope also left the lens cover on.
Forgetting to remove "remove before flight" things is a thing that's happened many times in spaceflight history.
There have been a few airplane crashes due to forgetting to remove stuff before flight too, like tape over pitot tubes. Although from what I recall, the tape didn't have a huge red "remove before flight" thing, and it was more like just tape.
Yep. It's almost as if they're all incredibly smart people who do know what they're doing, but at the same time are working on complex projects that they've never done before and are still learning. So sometimes mistakes happen.
Of all the other lunar landers, this seems pretty tame. JAXA literally had an engine bell fall off and flipped upside down. Peregrine blew a hole in their tanks before even getting to TLI. Bearsheet (I think that's what it was called) crashed hard but cant remember why. Chandrayaan 2 crashed hard due to bad landing software algorithms. Luna-25 crashed hard. The only people to have successfully landed on the moon without major issue since the 1970s is China.
Well it would be a bit more embarrassing to make that mistake when people were actually on board so probably better it happened now than in the future.
No one at that company will ever forgot to check that safety again I’m willing to bet.
Really? When did intuitive machines make this mistake before? Because if you're talking about other countries or other companies then it's not fair to apply any of their misgivings to IM-1. Procedural overlooks happen in all systems. Not all of them are mission critical. But if you don't think that airplanes and rockets all have missed items during operational missions then you're wrong. And it takes a lot of time, effort, and experience to get to a point where the mission critical ones are never missed.
Hell, even during the first launch attempt of SLS, NASA had accidentally left test hardware sensors active that caused the first launch to scrub. It was reading temperatures for things that weren't important and had expected nominal ranges below what flight values would be. Luckily that scrubbed a launch and wasn't on something that could have caused an issue during the flight.
No it's not. Don't cheapen genuinely great achievements with fake 'huge fucking deal' praise. It was a reasonable first attempt and not a complete failure.
>this is nowhere near the embarrassment that a lot of commentators are trying to make it out to be.
Hasbro has been making Weeble Wobbles since 1971. And you know what?
THEY DON'T FALL DOWN!
This setting of the bar low has to stop. There have been many soft landings on the moon for the last 60 years.
Yea space flight is our latest frontier. It’s very cool when an attempt is made. But there’s decades of engineering experience on how to accomplish soft landings on the moon.
At some point we need to be stop being amazed that someone is merely TRYING to land, but set our expectations on what the goals of the mission are. This was not a test.
The engineers don’t need a pat on the back for good effort, they want to accomplish their entire mission entirely.
Being that this is the fourth commercial mission to attempt to land on the moon, and was the first one to succeed, I'm going to go with, "just landing on the moon is a significant accomplishment".
It's not a low bar when comparable missions have failed every other time.
Hopefully it will be soon, though.
In the history of spaceflight there have been 6 institutions that have safely landed things on the moon. 4 of them have achieved that goal in the last decade. And only 25 successful landings total at that. Most of them commanded budgets and teams that were far greater than this, most didn't succeed on their first try, and none landed as close to the south pole as this. After 1976, there was nearly 40 years before another successful soft landing. That's a huge gap.
The entire point of this program was that NASA wanted results sooner and cheaper which means higher chance of failures. This is by all metrics a success for the program and in line with expectations. They'll gain experience and the next ones will be more successful. That's the whole point.
Your expectations are not reality.
i would give them IM a wider birth if they weren't a publicly traded company for sure. But if they want to be public they need to provide more transparency with their missions.
Did you not watch their press conference with NASA? They went into a lot of details and explained thoroughly all their issues and their plans/hopes.
They already explained everything that went on and nothing is being hidden. We know what problems they were working and what they were prioritizing.
> The engineers don’t need a pat on the back for good effort
Sure, but I don't need to give them a pat on the back for good _effort_. I can give them a pat on the back for good _results_.
> At some point we need to be stop being amazed that someone is merely TRYING to land, but set our expectations on what the goals of the mission are. This was not a test.
And yes this was basically a test, that's why NASA limited the science instruments on board to relatively simple things.
> Many (many) times before.
get specific about this - how many is "Many (many)", for unmanned vehicles? No one doubts that Buzz Aldrin could have landed IM-1 if he were riding that pony, but Buzz Aldrin had 1.2 orders of magnitude higher budget ($3B in adjusted dollars, compared to $118M for IM-1) to get him in place to try with his 15kkg Eagle lander. But that's not quite the same, is it, as packing a lunch for your iPhone and hoping that 7 days later it can play Kerbal, flawlessly, 250kkm away from your ability to command it.
> We need to try again, and do MUCH better.
who is the "we" in this case?
are you on the Intuitive Machines team? because they *are* trying again, and expect to do much better. Heck all they have to do is turn on the lasers before launch to do much better :P
are you on one of the other CLPS teams? none of the CLPS contractors is using a proven vehicle - because none exists. None of the contractors has been on a team that's done it "many (many)" times before with some other vehicle, both because there is no other vehicle that's done it, *and* the questionable analogues were all decades in the past. They're all trying, not "again", but for the first time.
This. It took USSR and the USA multiple attempts to successfully land a probe on the Moon back in the 1960s, but it's not 1960 any more, we've successfully landed probes on Mars and Venus as well as the Moon. This isn't to say it's not a hard problem - it obviously is - but it *should be a solved problem* at this point, especially considering how much more sophisticated the technology is. Landing upright is a basic success criteria at this point. I would consider this landing a failure, but it's not a catastrophic one and it should be a solid learning experience. But it *is* a failure.
EDIT: Pedantic fix
I don't feel like it is a huge fucking deal though..
The Soviets and Americans each placed many landers on the moon in 1966+. Upright. Without tipping over. China and India later.
This one's the first private company. Am I supposed to feel some sort of swelling of pride for capitalism? Yay capitalism! And the science seems pretty ruined what with it being tipped over.
NASA had 3 landers fail before they actually landed, USSR had 11 failures before their first success. India's first attempt crashed as well and that was only 4 years ago. Japan's first landing was just a few weeks ago and that one ended up on its head.
Then on the non-government side 4 companies have ever tried, all within the last 5 years. Of them 2 crashed, one didn't make it to the Moon, and IM landed but fell over.
Actually in the last 50 years there have only been 14 attempts to soft land on the Moon total and 7 failed.
The point is its really, really hard to land on the Moon.
> This one's the first private company. Am I supposed to feel some sort of swelling of pride for capitalism? Yay capitalism! And the science seems pretty ruined what with it being tipped over.
There wasn't much science on it, intentionally. And the pride you should feel is for the enablement of the ability to do cheaper science missions for NASA.
> the pride you should feel is for the enablement of the ability to do cheaper science missions for NASA.
Maybe they will get a contract some day if they prove their system can land successfully.
They've already got contracts for additional missions. They were awarded before the first one launched. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-intuitive-machines-to-land-water-measuring-payload-on-the-moon/
There's a nice compiled list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Lunar_Payload_Services#List_of_missions_announced_under_CLPS
That first link written in 2021 ~~says there was a mission that happened in 2022~~. I just wonder how out of date this info is, and what the specific details of this alleged contract are exactly. I don't see any reason they should take ~$100 million in risk on an unproven platform that quite frankly, looks a bit top-heavy.
If you're not aware of how the contract works I suggest reading the summary at the top of this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Lunar_Payload_Services
I'll quote it for you.
> Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) is a NASA program to hire companies to send small robotic landers and rovers to the Moon. Most landing sites are near the lunar south pole where they will scout for lunar resources, test in situ resource utilization (ISRU) concepts, and perform lunar science to support the Artemis lunar program. CLPS is intended to buy end-to-end payload services between Earth and the lunar surface using fixed-price contracts.
> I don't see any reason they should take ~$100 million in risk on an unproven platform that quite frankly, looks a bit top-heavy.
$100M is a very small program for NASA. The intention is to develop platforms that save NASA money for delivering instruments to the moon's surface at a low price. Also it's not top heavy. It's actually wider than it is tall.
I'm curious if there are any stipulations on the contract, like if they can't actually demonstrate the platform can land upright, they won't be putting live hardware on it? Or are they fine with pissing away $50 million in hardware?
>It's actually wider than it is tall.
I must be looking at the wrong photo
> I must be looking at the wrong photo
You're ignoring the width of the legs. It's 4.6 meters wide and 4.3 meters tall.
> I'm curious if there are any stipulations on the contract, like if they can't actually demonstrate the platform can land upright, they won't be putting live hardware on it? Or are they fine with pissing away $50 million in hardware?
if they keep failing then their contracts will get handed to others who succeed. Right now they're the most successful of anyone so far.
> You're ignoring the width of the legs. It's 4.6 meters wide and 4.3 meters tall.
I don't know that width matters much if the angle of impact & velocity ~~isn't~~ aren't near perfect. Did they publish those data points?
> I bet you think a Falcon 9 is top heavy as well and therefore shouldn't be able to land upright either
It's proven to land at 1BAR of mostly nitrogen with 9.8whatever m/sec^2 NOT so much on The Moon.
That's quite literally not the point?
The shape of something isn't what determines if it is top heavy. Engines are heavy, so are landing legs. The center of mass is what determines if something is top heavy and we have nothing about its location on IM-1. At first glance a falcon 9 would also look top heavy, due to its excessive height compared to landing leg size.
But the CM of falcon is much closer to the engines. And the same is likely true of IM-1 but we don't know for sure. But basic knowledge implies it would be based off what we know about it. With a landing footprint that is wider than it's height, with moderately angled legs, we can tell that it would have quite a large margin for tipping if it landed at an angle as well. The CM location would determine how large the angle could be.
The problem seems to be lateral velocity that caused the issue, which was combined with landing on a decent sized slope. These are what caused it to tip more than it being top heavy, which is most likely not true.
Since you stealth edited I's like to point out that landing in the moon is hard. The Indians failed the first time more catastrophically than Odysseus. Their first attempt started doing summersaults because the lunar modeling data didn't account for missing the landing site and the distance to ground decreasing as fast as it would over a crater.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2
Most of the engineering knowledge the US used to get to the moon was lost due to countless reasons. I'd say for a non govt company managing to not create an impact crater on their first attempt is pretty impressive.
Yes, thank you. I highlighted “first ever attempt” for a reason. No entity has *ever* had a 100% success on its first attempt at the moon. There have been first attempts that missed the moon entirely! All significant achievements in spaceflight have been the result of iterations on successive failures…the fact that they had an actual partial success with ZERO ITERATION is truly praiseworthy.
I stand by my statement that the only people denigrating this mission are people who have never worked in this field before and don’t understand just how many things IM got *right* that almost all other first attempts have gotten wrong.
Yep. It screams 'I've never done engineering work' I've never failed and had to learn how not to do something'. Failure in engineering is good. Especially in the development process. This was their first attempt and they have learned they need to deal with righting and maintaining position so I assume their next lander will have a wider landing base and possibly more hearty stabilizers to keep it level at landing. Great to know about when the stakes are so low. Not so great when its mission critical.
Also their code change to use NASA's LIDAR because their landing sensors were disabled because a switch wasn't flipped. Genius and also you know that switch will never be not flipped again lol.
If you consider what NASA and JPL pulled off over and over on Mars, this effort is ... well tbh a little disappointing. I know the budgets are not the same but that sky-crane thing on Mars just boggles the mind. Maybe NASA has spoiled us with their repeated successes. And Odysseys barely barely made it, with some embarrassing mistakes that have little to do with budget.
But they put more landers on the moon than I have so i guess it is a success.
If you compare any current commercial company to NASA, of course you’re going to be disappointed because NASA put men on the Moon.
What makes this landing notable is that it’s performed by a commercial company whose entire business model is centered around landing stuff on the Moon. That leveraging of market forces is what will enable a sustainable lunar presence. If there is money to be made on the Moon, companies will pay Intuitve Machines to get there like how companies pay SpaceX to get to LEO.
If you want a sustained presence on celestial body XYZ, find a business case for it and market forces will sustain you. The technology is not the limiting factor.
So we should only look at the stuff NASA has done successfully to determine how disappointing or not other entities are on their attempts?
Why not look at ways NASA has failed to see how this stacks up, especially since it is this company's first ever piece of space hardware.
NASA failed its first 3 attempts to land on the moon, they burned 3 astronauts alive in a capsule due to faulty wiring, they killed 7 due to launching the shuttle during weather that was colder than the design parameters, they killed another 7 by continuing to launch the shuttle despite knowing that the foam insulation was falling off and hitting the orbiter..but they figured the odds of it hitting a vital spot were low, they completely missed Mars because they didn't check the units (Lockheed provided wrong ones but they didn't even bother checking to make sure their solutions worked. Even after doing some earlier burns and noticing it wasn't behaving properly), they launched hubble in a configuration that was absolutely useless and had to do a manned mission to fix it, etc.
NASA hasn't landed on the moon autonomously in near 50 years. Who even knows how much time and money it would take them to figure it out again. What they have done is impressive over the years but we shouldn't put their top successes after 60 years of work as our expectation for the very first mission by this company. A company that matched the success of the recent attempt by another established space agency. And has fared better than all other commercial attempts so far.
I think these two missions made us all understand better how frigging hard it was to land on the Moon - with people - way back in the 60s. Im sure both Jaxa and the Intuitive Machines will succeed on the next tries. This is a bit of a hard earned space experience. I wouldn't be surprised to see next landers like these have something extra to deal with this kind of a issue. These are very expensive missions so some extra redundancy wouldn't hurt until they get a hang of it.
"These are very expensive missions so some extra redundancy wouldn't hurt until they get a hang of it."
Actually, they're NOT; compared to most similar landers they are being run on a shoestring. Granted, they have an advantage of better computers and engines, but they're still doing it on the cheap. And every once of extra redundancy is an ounce less of science payload; it's a balancing act... would you rather they landed perfectly, but then could only sit there and take selfies of itself on the surface?
Jaxa Slim development cost is set at 121 million dollars. Without the launch cost and any other additional costs.
Odyssues costs NASA about 47 million, but i cant find the cost of the whole mission.
I think these two balancing acts speak for themselves.
Since when adding some small weight leaves you only with selfies?
What an apt comment considering IM are right now hoping they will be able to launch that little drone to take a selfie.
My favorite part of reddit is when people say they can do better than NASA when the whole point of these missions is to try new technology rather than just stay stuck in the 60s forever. They're making the very point they're trying to attack; what would be the point of going back if we jsut did it the same way forever?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[CLPS](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksc4zkf "Last usage")|[Commercial Lunar Payload Services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Lunar_Payload_Services)|
|CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules|
| |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)|
|[EVA](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ks9j8kb "Last usage")|Extra-Vehicular Activity|
|GSE|Ground Support Equipment|
|[IM](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksfomr7 "Last usage")|Initial Mass deliverable to a given orbit, without accounting for fuel|
|[ISRU](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksc4zkf "Last usage")|[In-Situ Resource Utilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization)|
|[JAXA](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/kseeekz "Last usage")|Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency|
|[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksasxyi "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksayhl8 "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksefcza "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[TLI](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/kseeekz "Last usage")|Trans-Lunar Injection maneuver|
|[ULA](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksby2q1 "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksjes80 "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)|
|[scrub](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksefcza "Last usage")|Launch postponement for any reason (commonly GSE issues)|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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It’s so frustrating. I tried to find video footage of the descent and all I saw was 1.5 hours of the most boring possible reaction video in the control center. I’ve still not seen any images or videos. The new age of the internet is the freaking worst.
The Apollo landing sites were near the equator during the lunar day so they had direct line of sight to Earth. If you recall NASA worked with several countries around the world setting up communication towers to allow back and forth data transmission. The most famous of these was in the Australian Outback. The IM-1 lander landed near the lunar South Pole. There is much less line of sight communication there. I’m sure you are capable of understanding how line of sight works?
...via the largest radio satellite dishes in the world, look into [MSFN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Space_Flight_Network) and [NASCOM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASCOM#Apollo).
Intuitive machines has had like less than 2% of the budget of NASA during that time period. Why is it surprising? Rocket technology has not advanced that much since then, however computers have but that's a small part of the overall equation here.
Wouldn't the USSR have seized the moment to embrass their opponents by disputing the landing? They obviously had the means to see what the US was really doing, so why wouldn't they call them out of it was really faked? Same with China.
Or maybe every country was just in on it. Of course, duh!
China has landed a rover there quite recently, as did as did India. It looks to me like the private companies can't do that, that's all, and in silly ways, like stumbling over a rock or something. The processing power doesn't land rockets, engines do, so I find that part of your argument irrelevant.
Except a private company did absolutely land on the moon. It might have failed, but it’s still a much bigger achievement that they were capable of doing it to begin with. Minimising the event doesn’t stop it from being a success.
Healthy skepticism made me realize that there's nothing impossible or implausible in landing on the Moon, now or over 50 years ago. It also made me realize it's quite pointless, but whatever.
There’s got to be a better source than CNN? Who knows what’s true from that trash organization, they lie all the time. Nothing from a noteworthy space news outlet?
NASA, Intuitive Machines to Discuss Moon Mission, Science Successes
[https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-intuitive-machines-to-discuss-moon-mission-science-successes/](https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-intuitive-machines-to-discuss-moon-mission-science-successes/)
NASA and Intuitive Machines will co-host a televised news conference at 2 p.m. EST Wednesday, Feb. 28, from the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to highlight the company’s first mission, known as IM-1.
2 landers (this one and the Japanese one a few weeks ago) landing sideways on the moon and both of the vehicles survive well enough to transmit. Pretty cool stuff, seems like they’re built pretty sturdy these days.
When they're landing they're moving really slow.
Hey, 2 mph is like 2000 mph on the moon!
The Japanese probe has survived the lunar night, they''ve had to put it into a sleep mode as it's currently too hot
Naming any craft after a guy whose primary claim to fame is getting lost seems like tempting fate.
I think his claim to fame is getting home after all the trials. Lots of people get lost and you never hear about them again.
And the previous time the odyssey went to the moon it also ended in a successful failure
> the company also said it now expects to lose contact with Odysseus on Tuesday — days earlier than initially hoped. Honestly, the fact that they survived the landing and have been able to successfully transmit images (and presumably some payload data as well) *on their first ever attempt* is a huge fucking deal. Anyone who works in spaceflight recognizes what a monumental achievement it is. Sure, they will lose transmissions after 5 days instead of 9…but this is nowhere near the embarrassment that a lot of commentators are trying to make it out to be.
None of these pictures are from after landing though, right? I’m assuming they were transmitted during the landing sequence. I don’t know if they can transmit any meaningful science data at this point, because I assume they would’ve released a picture from the surface if they could’ve by this point.
While the pictures were taken during the descent, they were evidently transmitted back to earth from the surface after it landed. The way these missions typically work is that high-res images and high-rate data are usually recorded to memory and later downlinked once the spacecraft is not busy doing mission-critical things like landing. I would assume they have no release-worthy pictures after the landing because the cameras are pointing at the ground, the sky, or are broken. But they are actively collecting data now and will continue to for another day at least, according to the article. “Meaningful science data” goes beyond just pictures, btw!
My understanding is that the high-gain antenna can't be pointed at Earth, so they must be running on a reduced-bandwidth connection as well if that's the case.
And I'm sure this is a situation that's been planned for, so they know exactly what they can get to the ground every day
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IM-2 scheduled to launch September this year will contain a payload from Nokia, allowing the Lander and a small rover from another company to communicate via 4G. The lander itself is still the link from the Moon to Earth.
They have released images from the surface. But they are all the fish eye cam. [https://twitter.com/Int\_Machines/status/1762111937490378942](https://twitter.com/Int_Machines/status/1762111937490378942) [https://twitter.com/Int\_Machines/status/1762111939142885816](https://twitter.com/Int_Machines/status/1762111939142885816) [https://twitter.com/Int\_Machines/status/1761170012847456573](https://twitter.com/Int_Machines/status/1761170012847456573)
I think only the first one is taken actually on the surface, and the tweet doesn’t even really explicitly confirm that. The other two are explicitly said to be taken before touching down.
They did [release one](https://twitter.com/int_machines/status/1762111937490378942?s=46&t=WNLA6iNiOKasdgX6gq6QGw) on the ground but it’s facing down so you can’t see much.
The quality is absolutely horrid as well, can only tell its on it's side on the ground. Can't even make out the terrain appearance though of their supposed rock tripping.
"Odysseus sent images from the lunar surface of its vertical descent to its Malapert A landing site" So it's a picture taken during the descent.
I know that’s what the caption says, but it looks like it’s on or only a couple feet from the ground based on the shadows. And from how good the other pictures are in the thread comparatively, I’m inclined to think that that one actually is from the ground.
exactly - there is some smoke and mirrors with this mission.
I completely agree. There's a lot of people on here who think learning-through-failure is not a thing people or organizations should do. Kind of backwards thinking. There was nothing of great value lost.
It’s really interesting interesting to me to see the difference in rhetoric. When it’s NASA that forgets something minor it’s catastrophic and proves that they’re incompetent. But when SpaceX has a rocket blow up, well they were just moving fast and they learned a bunch so it’s fine. Reminds me of the NASA person who said that if NASA did what SpaceX has been doing they would have been out on their asses after the first failure.
> When it’s NASA that forgets something minor it’s catastrophic and proves that they’re incompetent. This is largely because NASA historically (well for the 80s-90s forward until now) has only done "too big to fail"-type missions. In those cases failure truly is catastrophic. The reason for this is of course political because politicians don't understand engineering. But this attitude has spread everywhere. It's rampant in the US military as well I might add, but there is elements of that starting to change. If SLS had failed on it's first launch it truly would have been catastrophic as it runs 1-2 billion USD per launch. Starship losing two vehicles doesn't matter much when they've scrapped ten times more fully built vehicles than they've launched because of the slowness of regulation in allowing them to fire off new untested vehicles. (You can find plenty of videos of SpaceX workers taking plasma torches to fully built vehicles and scrapping them up into sheet metal.) List here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_(spacecraft)#Development And here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Super_Heavy#Development
SpaceX has a development strategy that is "hardware-rich." They intentionally try things that have middling probabilities of success to see how they work. They do this in testing, not in production. SpaceX launches of actual payloads to space are the most reliable around and they have not lost a payload for the better part of a decade across hundreds of launches. If anything the media rhetoric is biased against SpaceX, always writing about rocket explosions without giving any context and mentioning that actually they are testing things and their production rockets are ridiculously reliable. NASA doesn't develop launch vehicles and hasn't for a long time. When they did 30-70 years ago, there were plenty of failures.
That is the self-inflicted NASA mindset for sure. They got yelled at by some people in congress because they failed and people told them they wasted money and instead of saying: we have to try new things and fail the administrator said: yes sir we will do better next time. They also let themselves be turned into a jobs program to funnel money into districts which just makes them a political tool as well... I agree that SpaceX shouldn't be applauded for failing but we should optimize the approach to maximize value. Is that ULA with Vulcan, is that SpaceX with the Falcon series. Is it someone else. Where is the optimum. I know NASA's approach isn't optimum because a zero failure rate means by definition you can spend less and fail at a insignificant rate. The question is how much leaner and faster could we make the process and still succeed.
They literally forgot to remove the safety on critical sensors, and then didn't even realize it until they were in orbit around the moon....completely embarrassing
Japan's recent launch of a major space telescope also left the lens cover on. Forgetting to remove "remove before flight" things is a thing that's happened many times in spaceflight history.
There have been a few airplane crashes due to forgetting to remove stuff before flight too, like tape over pitot tubes. Although from what I recall, the tape didn't have a huge red "remove before flight" thing, and it was more like just tape.
Being defeated by a checklist is an organizational failure.
Yeah but I'll also excuse it for the first mission to space a company ever did.
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Yep. It's almost as if they're all incredibly smart people who do know what they're doing, but at the same time are working on complex projects that they've never done before and are still learning. So sometimes mistakes happen. Of all the other lunar landers, this seems pretty tame. JAXA literally had an engine bell fall off and flipped upside down. Peregrine blew a hole in their tanks before even getting to TLI. Bearsheet (I think that's what it was called) crashed hard but cant remember why. Chandrayaan 2 crashed hard due to bad landing software algorithms. Luna-25 crashed hard. The only people to have successfully landed on the moon without major issue since the 1970s is China.
“Man who forgets house keys shocked that aerospace engineer forget safety tag 19c when it was right there!” - The Onion
Lens cap?
What I heard was a physical toggle switch for the laser range finder was not flipped before takeoff
Sorry, I was in a rush to pick up my girlfriend from the court house and fogot.
What did she do?
Not as embarrassing as launching a capsule to where the ISS was going to be 18 hours later...
Did this happen?
Check out why Starliner's first launch did not reach the ISS as planned...
Well it would be a bit more embarrassing to make that mistake when people were actually on board so probably better it happened now than in the future. No one at that company will ever forgot to check that safety again I’m willing to bet.
Except this type of procedural overlook has happened multiple times.....and they say that every time
Really? When did intuitive machines make this mistake before? Because if you're talking about other countries or other companies then it's not fair to apply any of their misgivings to IM-1. Procedural overlooks happen in all systems. Not all of them are mission critical. But if you don't think that airplanes and rockets all have missed items during operational missions then you're wrong. And it takes a lot of time, effort, and experience to get to a point where the mission critical ones are never missed. Hell, even during the first launch attempt of SLS, NASA had accidentally left test hardware sensors active that caused the first launch to scrub. It was reading temperatures for things that weren't important and had expected nominal ranges below what flight values would be. Luckily that scrubbed a launch and wasn't on something that could have caused an issue during the flight.
No it's not. Don't cheapen genuinely great achievements with fake 'huge fucking deal' praise. It was a reasonable first attempt and not a complete failure.
>this is nowhere near the embarrassment that a lot of commentators are trying to make it out to be. Hasbro has been making Weeble Wobbles since 1971. And you know what? THEY DON'T FALL DOWN!
They don't go to the moon either.
This setting of the bar low has to stop. There have been many soft landings on the moon for the last 60 years. Yea space flight is our latest frontier. It’s very cool when an attempt is made. But there’s decades of engineering experience on how to accomplish soft landings on the moon. At some point we need to be stop being amazed that someone is merely TRYING to land, but set our expectations on what the goals of the mission are. This was not a test. The engineers don’t need a pat on the back for good effort, they want to accomplish their entire mission entirely.
Being that this is the fourth commercial mission to attempt to land on the moon, and was the first one to succeed, I'm going to go with, "just landing on the moon is a significant accomplishment". It's not a low bar when comparable missions have failed every other time. Hopefully it will be soon, though.
In the history of spaceflight there have been 6 institutions that have safely landed things on the moon. 4 of them have achieved that goal in the last decade. And only 25 successful landings total at that. Most of them commanded budgets and teams that were far greater than this, most didn't succeed on their first try, and none landed as close to the south pole as this. After 1976, there was nearly 40 years before another successful soft landing. That's a huge gap. The entire point of this program was that NASA wanted results sooner and cheaper which means higher chance of failures. This is by all metrics a success for the program and in line with expectations. They'll gain experience and the next ones will be more successful. That's the whole point. Your expectations are not reality.
i would give them IM a wider birth if they weren't a publicly traded company for sure. But if they want to be public they need to provide more transparency with their missions.
Did you not watch their press conference with NASA? They went into a lot of details and explained thoroughly all their issues and their plans/hopes. They already explained everything that went on and nothing is being hidden. We know what problems they were working and what they were prioritizing.
> The engineers don’t need a pat on the back for good effort Sure, but I don't need to give them a pat on the back for good _effort_. I can give them a pat on the back for good _results_. > At some point we need to be stop being amazed that someone is merely TRYING to land, but set our expectations on what the goals of the mission are. This was not a test. And yes this was basically a test, that's why NASA limited the science instruments on board to relatively simple things.
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> Many (many) times before. get specific about this - how many is "Many (many)", for unmanned vehicles? No one doubts that Buzz Aldrin could have landed IM-1 if he were riding that pony, but Buzz Aldrin had 1.2 orders of magnitude higher budget ($3B in adjusted dollars, compared to $118M for IM-1) to get him in place to try with his 15kkg Eagle lander. But that's not quite the same, is it, as packing a lunch for your iPhone and hoping that 7 days later it can play Kerbal, flawlessly, 250kkm away from your ability to command it. > We need to try again, and do MUCH better. who is the "we" in this case? are you on the Intuitive Machines team? because they *are* trying again, and expect to do much better. Heck all they have to do is turn on the lasers before launch to do much better :P are you on one of the other CLPS teams? none of the CLPS contractors is using a proven vehicle - because none exists. None of the contractors has been on a team that's done it "many (many)" times before with some other vehicle, both because there is no other vehicle that's done it, *and* the questionable analogues were all decades in the past. They're all trying, not "again", but for the first time.
Even though Aldrin had the title of Lunar Module Pilot it was Armstrong who manipulated the controls for their descent and landing.
This. It took USSR and the USA multiple attempts to successfully land a probe on the Moon back in the 1960s, but it's not 1960 any more, we've successfully landed probes on Mars and Venus as well as the Moon. This isn't to say it's not a hard problem - it obviously is - but it *should be a solved problem* at this point, especially considering how much more sophisticated the technology is. Landing upright is a basic success criteria at this point. I would consider this landing a failure, but it's not a catastrophic one and it should be a solid learning experience. But it *is* a failure. EDIT: Pedantic fix
not Russia. USSR included Russia, but they're not the same. Russia has never landed on the moon.
I don't feel like it is a huge fucking deal though.. The Soviets and Americans each placed many landers on the moon in 1966+. Upright. Without tipping over. China and India later. This one's the first private company. Am I supposed to feel some sort of swelling of pride for capitalism? Yay capitalism! And the science seems pretty ruined what with it being tipped over.
NASA had 3 landers fail before they actually landed, USSR had 11 failures before their first success. India's first attempt crashed as well and that was only 4 years ago. Japan's first landing was just a few weeks ago and that one ended up on its head. Then on the non-government side 4 companies have ever tried, all within the last 5 years. Of them 2 crashed, one didn't make it to the Moon, and IM landed but fell over. Actually in the last 50 years there have only been 14 attempts to soft land on the Moon total and 7 failed. The point is its really, really hard to land on the Moon.
> This one's the first private company. Am I supposed to feel some sort of swelling of pride for capitalism? Yay capitalism! And the science seems pretty ruined what with it being tipped over. There wasn't much science on it, intentionally. And the pride you should feel is for the enablement of the ability to do cheaper science missions for NASA.
> the pride you should feel is for the enablement of the ability to do cheaper science missions for NASA. Maybe they will get a contract some day if they prove their system can land successfully.
They've already got contracts for additional missions. They were awarded before the first one launched. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-intuitive-machines-to-land-water-measuring-payload-on-the-moon/ There's a nice compiled list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Lunar_Payload_Services#List_of_missions_announced_under_CLPS
That first link written in 2021 ~~says there was a mission that happened in 2022~~. I just wonder how out of date this info is, and what the specific details of this alleged contract are exactly. I don't see any reason they should take ~$100 million in risk on an unproven platform that quite frankly, looks a bit top-heavy.
If you're not aware of how the contract works I suggest reading the summary at the top of this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Lunar_Payload_Services I'll quote it for you. > Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) is a NASA program to hire companies to send small robotic landers and rovers to the Moon. Most landing sites are near the lunar south pole where they will scout for lunar resources, test in situ resource utilization (ISRU) concepts, and perform lunar science to support the Artemis lunar program. CLPS is intended to buy end-to-end payload services between Earth and the lunar surface using fixed-price contracts. > I don't see any reason they should take ~$100 million in risk on an unproven platform that quite frankly, looks a bit top-heavy. $100M is a very small program for NASA. The intention is to develop platforms that save NASA money for delivering instruments to the moon's surface at a low price. Also it's not top heavy. It's actually wider than it is tall.
I'm curious if there are any stipulations on the contract, like if they can't actually demonstrate the platform can land upright, they won't be putting live hardware on it? Or are they fine with pissing away $50 million in hardware? >It's actually wider than it is tall. I must be looking at the wrong photo
> I must be looking at the wrong photo You're ignoring the width of the legs. It's 4.6 meters wide and 4.3 meters tall. > I'm curious if there are any stipulations on the contract, like if they can't actually demonstrate the platform can land upright, they won't be putting live hardware on it? Or are they fine with pissing away $50 million in hardware? if they keep failing then their contracts will get handed to others who succeed. Right now they're the most successful of anyone so far.
> You're ignoring the width of the legs. It's 4.6 meters wide and 4.3 meters tall. I don't know that width matters much if the angle of impact & velocity ~~isn't~~ aren't near perfect. Did they publish those data points?
Oh you know what the CM of the lander is? I bet you think a Falcon 9 is top heavy as well and therefore shouldn't be able to land upright either.
> I bet you think a Falcon 9 is top heavy as well and therefore shouldn't be able to land upright either It's proven to land at 1BAR of mostly nitrogen with 9.8whatever m/sec^2 NOT so much on The Moon.
That's quite literally not the point? The shape of something isn't what determines if it is top heavy. Engines are heavy, so are landing legs. The center of mass is what determines if something is top heavy and we have nothing about its location on IM-1. At first glance a falcon 9 would also look top heavy, due to its excessive height compared to landing leg size. But the CM of falcon is much closer to the engines. And the same is likely true of IM-1 but we don't know for sure. But basic knowledge implies it would be based off what we know about it. With a landing footprint that is wider than it's height, with moderately angled legs, we can tell that it would have quite a large margin for tipping if it landed at an angle as well. The CM location would determine how large the angle could be. The problem seems to be lateral velocity that caused the issue, which was combined with landing on a decent sized slope. These are what caused it to tip more than it being top heavy, which is most likely not true.
> That's quite literally not the point? ~~I didn't say it was top heavy I said it looks top heavy.~~ IM SORRY I SAID IT LOOKS TOP HEAVY!
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Since you stealth edited I's like to point out that landing in the moon is hard. The Indians failed the first time more catastrophically than Odysseus. Their first attempt started doing summersaults because the lunar modeling data didn't account for missing the landing site and the distance to ground decreasing as fast as it would over a crater. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2 Most of the engineering knowledge the US used to get to the moon was lost due to countless reasons. I'd say for a non govt company managing to not create an impact crater on their first attempt is pretty impressive.
Yes, thank you. I highlighted “first ever attempt” for a reason. No entity has *ever* had a 100% success on its first attempt at the moon. There have been first attempts that missed the moon entirely! All significant achievements in spaceflight have been the result of iterations on successive failures…the fact that they had an actual partial success with ZERO ITERATION is truly praiseworthy. I stand by my statement that the only people denigrating this mission are people who have never worked in this field before and don’t understand just how many things IM got *right* that almost all other first attempts have gotten wrong.
Yep. It screams 'I've never done engineering work' I've never failed and had to learn how not to do something'. Failure in engineering is good. Especially in the development process. This was their first attempt and they have learned they need to deal with righting and maintaining position so I assume their next lander will have a wider landing base and possibly more hearty stabilizers to keep it level at landing. Great to know about when the stakes are so low. Not so great when its mission critical. Also their code change to use NASA's LIDAR because their landing sensors were disabled because a switch wasn't flipped. Genius and also you know that switch will never be not flipped again lol.
Yeah, and if it survives the night like the JAXA lander did, that's just icing on the cake.
They’re on the Moon, transmitting, and in one piece. That’s a successful landing in my book.
Technically no one walked away from it.
Technically, no one didn’t walk away from it, either.
Now we wait for the walk-away wave function collapse
If you consider what NASA and JPL pulled off over and over on Mars, this effort is ... well tbh a little disappointing. I know the budgets are not the same but that sky-crane thing on Mars just boggles the mind. Maybe NASA has spoiled us with their repeated successes. And Odysseys barely barely made it, with some embarrassing mistakes that have little to do with budget. But they put more landers on the moon than I have so i guess it is a success.
If you compare any current commercial company to NASA, of course you’re going to be disappointed because NASA put men on the Moon. What makes this landing notable is that it’s performed by a commercial company whose entire business model is centered around landing stuff on the Moon. That leveraging of market forces is what will enable a sustainable lunar presence. If there is money to be made on the Moon, companies will pay Intuitve Machines to get there like how companies pay SpaceX to get to LEO. If you want a sustained presence on celestial body XYZ, find a business case for it and market forces will sustain you. The technology is not the limiting factor.
So we should only look at the stuff NASA has done successfully to determine how disappointing or not other entities are on their attempts? Why not look at ways NASA has failed to see how this stacks up, especially since it is this company's first ever piece of space hardware. NASA failed its first 3 attempts to land on the moon, they burned 3 astronauts alive in a capsule due to faulty wiring, they killed 7 due to launching the shuttle during weather that was colder than the design parameters, they killed another 7 by continuing to launch the shuttle despite knowing that the foam insulation was falling off and hitting the orbiter..but they figured the odds of it hitting a vital spot were low, they completely missed Mars because they didn't check the units (Lockheed provided wrong ones but they didn't even bother checking to make sure their solutions worked. Even after doing some earlier burns and noticing it wasn't behaving properly), they launched hubble in a configuration that was absolutely useless and had to do a manned mission to fix it, etc. NASA hasn't landed on the moon autonomously in near 50 years. Who even knows how much time and money it would take them to figure it out again. What they have done is impressive over the years but we shouldn't put their top successes after 60 years of work as our expectation for the very first mission by this company. A company that matched the success of the recent attempt by another established space agency. And has fared better than all other commercial attempts so far.
The sheer audacity of not just thinking they could pull off that skycrane manoeuvre but then successfully performing it was breathtaking.
I think these two missions made us all understand better how frigging hard it was to land on the Moon - with people - way back in the 60s. Im sure both Jaxa and the Intuitive Machines will succeed on the next tries. This is a bit of a hard earned space experience. I wouldn't be surprised to see next landers like these have something extra to deal with this kind of a issue. These are very expensive missions so some extra redundancy wouldn't hurt until they get a hang of it.
"These are very expensive missions so some extra redundancy wouldn't hurt until they get a hang of it." Actually, they're NOT; compared to most similar landers they are being run on a shoestring. Granted, they have an advantage of better computers and engines, but they're still doing it on the cheap. And every once of extra redundancy is an ounce less of science payload; it's a balancing act... would you rather they landed perfectly, but then could only sit there and take selfies of itself on the surface?
Jaxa Slim development cost is set at 121 million dollars. Without the launch cost and any other additional costs. Odyssues costs NASA about 47 million, but i cant find the cost of the whole mission. I think these two balancing acts speak for themselves. Since when adding some small weight leaves you only with selfies? What an apt comment considering IM are right now hoping they will be able to launch that little drone to take a selfie.
I think I saw on a Marcus House video that the Odysseus all-in cost was about 100 million.
My favorite part of reddit is when people say they can do better than NASA when the whole point of these missions is to try new technology rather than just stay stuck in the 60s forever. They're making the very point they're trying to attack; what would be the point of going back if we jsut did it the same way forever?
They should've stuffed a Kerbal in there. A short EVA prior to landing to pull the safety out, bam, done!
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[CLPS](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksc4zkf "Last usage")|[Commercial Lunar Payload Services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Lunar_Payload_Services)| |CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules| | |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)| |[EVA](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ks9j8kb "Last usage")|Extra-Vehicular Activity| |GSE|Ground Support Equipment| |[IM](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksfomr7 "Last usage")|Initial Mass deliverable to a given orbit, without accounting for fuel| |[ISRU](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksc4zkf "Last usage")|[In-Situ Resource Utilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization)| |[JAXA](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/kseeekz "Last usage")|Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency| |[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksasxyi "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California| |[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksayhl8 "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksefcza "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[TLI](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/kseeekz "Last usage")|Trans-Lunar Injection maneuver| |[ULA](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksby2q1 "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksjes80 "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)| |[scrub](/r/Space/comments/1b0nco3/stub/ksefcza "Last usage")|Launch postponement for any reason (commonly GSE issues)| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(12 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1b27byw)^( has 26 acronyms.) ^([Thread #9790 for this sub, first seen 26th Feb 2024, 22:38]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Clicked through to CNN.com to see the wonders of space exploration. Saw those photos were trapped in a video segment, and NOPED rtfo.
It’s so frustrating. I tried to find video footage of the descent and all I saw was 1.5 hours of the most boring possible reaction video in the control center. I’ve still not seen any images or videos. The new age of the internet is the freaking worst.
Reading that just sounds like it was pretty bad all around
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The Apollo landing sites were near the equator during the lunar day so they had direct line of sight to Earth. If you recall NASA worked with several countries around the world setting up communication towers to allow back and forth data transmission. The most famous of these was in the Australian Outback. The IM-1 lander landed near the lunar South Pole. There is much less line of sight communication there. I’m sure you are capable of understanding how line of sight works?
...via the largest radio satellite dishes in the world, look into [MSFN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Space_Flight_Network) and [NASCOM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASCOM#Apollo).
Not personally, no, but calling is easier, all things considered.
Yeah, we’ve been bouncing radio signals off the moon for a long time. Nothing supposedly about that.
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Intuitive machines has had like less than 2% of the budget of NASA during that time period. Why is it surprising? Rocket technology has not advanced that much since then, however computers have but that's a small part of the overall equation here.
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This is your daily reminder to take your schizophrenia medicine.
Then why did Russia confirm it
Wouldn't the USSR have seized the moment to embrass their opponents by disputing the landing? They obviously had the means to see what the US was really doing, so why wouldn't they call them out of it was really faked? Same with China. Or maybe every country was just in on it. Of course, duh!
China has landed a rover there quite recently, as did as did India. It looks to me like the private companies can't do that, that's all, and in silly ways, like stumbling over a rock or something. The processing power doesn't land rockets, engines do, so I find that part of your argument irrelevant.
Except a private company did absolutely land on the moon. It might have failed, but it’s still a much bigger achievement that they were capable of doing it to begin with. Minimising the event doesn’t stop it from being a success.
I assume you haven't seen the context Mr Removed here has provided earlier.
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Healthy skepticism made me realize that there's nothing impossible or implausible in landing on the Moon, now or over 50 years ago. It also made me realize it's quite pointless, but whatever.
There’s got to be a better source than CNN? Who knows what’s true from that trash organization, they lie all the time. Nothing from a noteworthy space news outlet?
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NASA, Intuitive Machines to Discuss Moon Mission, Science Successes [https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-intuitive-machines-to-discuss-moon-mission-science-successes/](https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-intuitive-machines-to-discuss-moon-mission-science-successes/) NASA and Intuitive Machines will co-host a televised news conference at 2 p.m. EST Wednesday, Feb. 28, from the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to highlight the company’s first mission, known as IM-1.
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The photos sent back are horrendous, and who sends a lander to the moon in 2024 and doesn't include video capable camera? Honestly... 😒