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
Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon
91–100 of 165 posts
Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon
#92Earlier 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…
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
#93Earlier 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.
Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon
#94Huge 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.
Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon
#95Earlier 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.
Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon
#96Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon
#97Earlier 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.
Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon
#98Earlier 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…
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
#99<3
Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon
#100Impressive 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.