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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

#131

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

foobarian wrote: post #72
cameldrv wrote: post #11

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…

> five percent of the federal budget. It's impressive to compare five percent and some small fraction, but the total budget also expanded a lot since then. While in constant dollars the current NASA budget is indeed smaller than it was then, it is only about half. At the end of the day, the kinds of things they spend that budget on make sense to me for a research organization, and it makes sense to me that retracing…

For comparison the military budget in the 60s was around 9%. Today it's around 3.5%.

5% today would be more than $1tn - a government-funded industry bigger than the entire military budget, comparable to the biggest tech companies.

It made sense in the 60s because the spinoffs from the green field R&D, especially in electronics and computing, are still paying a dividend.

Today? It's hard to see a moon base paying for itself any time soon. There's plenty of science to be done on the Moon, but direct dividends for industrial development are less clear.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#132

Post by bregma »

reachableceo wrote: post #60
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #32

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.

Isn't that the location of the soundstage where they filmed the Apollo landings? I would think it would be rich in appropriate resources. Flags and golf balls and stuff.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#133

Post by cstross »

I notice that the news media are bigging up the *private enterprise* angle for some reason -- marketing of commercial transport services maybe?

But I also note that Odysseus cost NASA a little over $100M on a fixed price contract, per Ars Technica.

By way of comparison, the Indian government's Chandrayaan-3 mission, the lander of which touched down in 2023, cost roughly $90M.

So private space isn't automatically cheaper than 100% government agency-run missions: it just depends on the agency.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#134

Post by _glass »

p1mrx wrote: post #76

https://twitter.com/Int_Machines/status/1760838333851148442 > After troubleshooting communications, flight controllers have confirmed Odysseus is upright and starting to send data. Right now, we are working to downlink the first images from the lunar surface.

Does anybody know what kind of software was patched? Some Ada/C++ code?

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#135

Post by nickserv »

tiagod wrote: 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.

The Guardian writes $118 million from NASA plus $130 million in private funds.

> Nasa contributed $118m to get it off the ground, with Intuitive Machines funding a further $130m

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#136

Post by edot »

cstross wrote: post #133

I notice that the news media are bigging up the *private enterprise* angle for some reason -- marketing of commercial transport services maybe? But I also note that Odysseus cost NASA a little over $100M on a fixed price contract, per Ars Technica. By way of comparison, the Indian government's Chandrayaan-3 mission, the lander of which touched down in 2023, cost roughly $90M. So private space isn't automatically chea…

$90M goes a lot further in India, though. But yes, you’re still correct that this mission doesn’t prove that private is cheaper. I’m sure that Intuitive Machines took a big loss on this in order to get the deal, and it still cost this much.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#137

Post by geoelectric »

mmoskal wrote: post #86
colonCapitalDee wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's to be expected, a dollar in India goes much further than a dollar in the US. https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p... says a dollar in India can buy you about 23 times as much stuff as that same dollar could in the US, although I'd expect that number to drop significantly for highly technical projects like a moon landing.

It's 23 rupees to a dollar at PPP. The exchange rate is 82, so a dollar goes 3.5 times further in India not 23 :)

Well, they spent 248M and India spent 74M. 74 * 3.5 == 259M so that tracks

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#138

Post by areyousure »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #131
foobarian wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> five percent of the federal budget. It's impressive to compare five percent and some small fraction, but the total budget also expanded a lot since then. While in constant dollars the current NASA budget is indeed smaller than it was then, it is only about half. At the end of the day, the kinds of things they spend that budget on make sense to me for a research organization, and it makes sense to me that retracing…

For comparison the military budget in the 60s was around 9%. Today it's around 3.5%. 5% today would be more than $1tn - a government-funded industry bigger than the entire military budget, comparable to the biggest tech companies. It made sense in the 60s because the spinoffs from the green field R&D, especially in electronics and computing, are still paying a dividend. Today? It's hard to see a moon base paying for…

Your number "3.5%" refers to US military spending as a proportion of GDP.

The original number "5%" refered to NASA spending as a proportion of the federal budget.

These baselines currently differ by approximately a factor of 4.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#139

Post by peteradio »

1propionyl wrote: post #89
_factor wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand. We actually had to fake this one to prove the faked ones weren’t fake.

No, poster above you had it right. You've got it backwards. We just can't afford the extensive investment into cinematic technology (cameras, lenses, props, etc) we used to... So now we're reduced to just actually doing it. A shame really.

The catering costs alone to do it cinematically make it a no-go.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#140

Post by orochimaaru »

tiagod wrote: 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.

There are differences. From the article it sounds like the falcon took a week to get to the moon. India’s mission took a month.

Second the payload is much bigger.

I don’t think cost comparisons in this case is accurate considering something bigger was delivered faster.

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