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Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

theguardian.com

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Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#91
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy enough until your fuel budget gets tight: http://moonlander.seb.ly

Been loving Lunar Lander ever since I played it in the 1980's. That is a very faithful version. I always loved how ti zoomed in when you got close to the terrain. (And that large throttle you used to control the thrust.) As a kid it was like impossible for me to play. Now it is just ... challenging. My voxel tribute: https://mooncraft2000.com

It’s fun but the performance plummets after only a few minutes even on a desktop computer.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of it is cost: In the mid sixties, NASA was about five percent of the federal budget. Another part is safety: Apollo was extremely dangerous. There were a lot of single points of failure, three astronauts died on the ground, three more were very very narrowly saved over the course of only about ten missions. One of the reasons the program was cut short was the political worry after Apollo 13 of having astronauts…

> Part of it is cost The other side to this is we don't build rockets today like we did in the sixties. Yes, some technical know-how here and there was technically "lost"--I've been in North Hollywood scrounging around for old NASA parts so that measurements could be taken and worked backwards from. But even if we had that know-how, we wouldn't do it the same again. From novel materials to simulations to communicatio…

Yep. One thing about manufacturing is that there are economies of scale everywhere. If we had to build a Saturn V from plans, we'd run into tons of problems. For one, the plans don't actually have everything you need to know. Tons of information is in people's heads. For a lot of the manual work, it's not even necessarily something they can explain. Building something with obsolete methods of fabrication is very difficult, but also the Saturn V was so optimized that switching materials or fabrication techniques would be very difficult. On the F-1 for example, they just barely got combustion to be stable. If you started substituting things, it's very possible it would become unstable again and they'd have to go do all the debugging they did out at the Edwards test stands again.

For almost everything, doing something a lot of times over a short period of time is way cheaper than doing something a small number of times, especially if there's a long time between them, and the employees have quit/retired and the tooling/machinery/suppliers have been disposed of, gone out of business, or moved onto other things.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, some technical know-how here and there was technically "lost"--I've been in North Hollywood scrounging around for old NASA parts so that measurements could be taken and worked backwards from. Oh, I don't know. I think we've actually made improvements in leaps and bounds over the "lost" tech. Our soundstage, green screen, and post tech has definitely improved /s I know it's not what you meant, but the NoHo refer…

> the NoHo reference made me laugh at the thought I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s a scrapyard with all kinds of space stuff (large and small) that I’m halfway sure isn’t ITAR controlled solely because the guy got it before 1976.

[deleted]

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#94
post #2

Huge congratulations to IM. Landing on the Moon is extremely difficult, despite what playing KSP will condition you to think. For them to successfully land on the Moon is a huge milestone. Now to get people back there... maybe someday.

Moon will be the first robot colony. Surely they will be friendly...

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#95
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason NASA's current plan is taking a bit longer is it is considerably more ambitious than the Apollo program. If they were only trying to replicate Apollo it would be far easier to do. Smarter Every Day had a rather interesting video on his concerns with the program. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU and they were more about a program design that requires over 15 fueling launches for every trip to the…

The proof is in the pudding. The pudding is that NASA of 2024 has no human space flight capability at all.

NASA of 2024 does not need human space flight capability, because that has been successfully commercialized.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Part of it is cost The other side to this is we don't build rockets today like we did in the sixties. Yes, some technical know-how here and there was technically "lost"--I've been in North Hollywood scrounging around for old NASA parts so that measurements could be taken and worked backwards from. But even if we had that know-how, we wouldn't do it the same again. From novel materials to simulations to communicatio…

North Hollywood? Looking through prop storage from studios or something? Some interesting junk and scrap shops in the area. Spent a few weekend afternoons puttering around looking at random stuff.

There were/are a couple of aerospace surplus shops in the area. Apex and Norton are the ones I'm familiar with. The supply comes from the SoCal aerospace industrial base and a lot of the demand is indeed for movie props. It's a fortuitous pairing - the prop rental business seems to be keeping them going to some extent whereas a lot of industrial surplus businesses in other parts of the country seem to be struggling these days.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#98
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did lose the capability. Read up on the engineering behind Saturn-V. There are books that go into extensive detail. A lot of the things described there required completely novel approaches that would be very difficult to replicate in deindustrialized United States of 2024. Not to mention that cost of all this would be absolutely astronomical, far more so than it was back then.

> lot of the things described there required completely novel approaches that would be very difficult to replicate in deindustrialized United States of 2024 Give me one example. > cost of all this would be absolutely astronomical, far more so than it was back then Inflation adjusted, the Saturn V was a $45bn project [1]. That's a mulitiple of the total capital SpaceX has raised (or been granted). [1] https://apollo11…

I’ll bite. The capability in the US to do large castings and forgings is basically gone. Good luck getting anything with a lead time of less than a couple years. In some cases, it simply can’t be done. That’s why we’re seeing so much investment into large scale additive manufacturing.

It’s interesting how this has become such a problem again. Post WW2, the US dismantled massive, basically building size hydraulic presses in former Nazi Germany and shipped them back to the US because that was a capability we didn’t have.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#100
post #7

Impressive feat. Got nervous when they couldn't contact the device, but turns out they did made history. I might be wrong, but from my research it seem like they did this with $118 million paid by NASA. India did it with around $74 million, for reference.

Given how much the cost difference typically is between India and the U.S., doing it in the U.S. at only a 50% premium is pretty impressive IMO. Wages alone are so much higher here that I would've expected a larger price tag.
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