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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

#151

Post by Firaxus »

p1mrx wrote: post #81
dylan604 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

They were concerned about not landing upright in the live stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg2ffigGcYM&t=5678s "looks like we had excellent pitch and yaw control throughout, but I did see a little bit of a roll excursion. could it be that we landed off-angle in roll in the final phase?"

I was thinking that because it was a roll excursion, assuming that’s along the axis intersecting the plain of the landing legs, it’s not a matter of being upright but rather a matter of being pointed in the wrong direction. Because they’re landed near the south poll of the moon, and because the moon is tidally locked to the earth and always shows us the same side, I imagine they have a very specific angle they need to be at to be looking at the earth just over the moon’s horizon.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#152

Post by throw0101c »

cameldrv wrote: post #11
internetter wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still just cannot wrap my mind around how we could get people there, and then all this time later have lost that ability. What happened?

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…

> Another part is safety: Apollo was extremely dangerous.

See the 'Safire Memo', "In Event of Moon Disaster":

* (PDF) https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:In_the_event_of_moon_disa...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Safire

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#153

Post by JKCalhoun »

skinner927 wrote: post #91
JKCalhoun wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not experiencing a change in performance. Curious what browser?

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#154

Post by jackothy »

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…

"direct dividends for industrial development are less clear"

Were those dividends clear in the 60s? Or are they only clear now that we look back on the venture 50 years later?

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#155

Post by ranger207 »

yieldcrv wrote: post #40
LorenDB wrote: 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.

Is there a good resource to follow all space efforts? I have no idea whats coming down the pipe and I used to

I like the Orbital Index's weekly newsletter. https://orbitalindex.com/

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#156

Post by sph »

bigiain wrote: post #24
coconutpalms wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even that easy in KSP!

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

Why does the horizontal speed reduce over time? There is no air friction on the Moon.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#157

Post by beanjuiceII »

orochimaaru wrote: post #140
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.

Exactly payload size has a lot to do with it. People are making silly surface comparisons

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#158

Post by marcellus23 »

cobbaut wrote: post #145
internetter wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still just cannot wrap my mind around how we could get people there, and then all this time later have lost that ability. What happened?

Michael Collins' book Carrying the Fire proves that the sixties were vastly different to today. For example people died while training to become astronauts, because the training was hard. This would be impossible today; the first time someone breaks so much as a leg the whole project would be suspended and several committees would need time to evaluate...

> For example people died while training to become astronauts, because the training was hard

I don't think this is correct. Astronauts died due to equipment malfunction (Apollo 1) or from airplane crashes or car crashes. But those aren't the same as dying because the training was too intense.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#159

Post by inamberclad »

_glass wrote: post #134
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?

Check out NASA cFS

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#160

Post by inemesitaffia »

bluGill wrote: post #149
edot wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

Does it? For the person who cleans that restrooms that money goes a lot farther. For the quick boot camp and we will write html it also goes farther. However for the good engineers it doesn't go nearly as far. Great engineers in India are in demand and their prices have gone up to match. I wouldn't attempt a project like this without a lot of great engineers. (Great engineers in India make less than the US equivalent…

The NASA equivalent pays much less.

But they have perks like chauffeurs and household staff that wouldn't be available to the equivalent in the USA

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