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Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

theguardian.com

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Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#101

Post by mmooss »

sho_hn wrote: post #43
olex wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to IM's website, it landed within 250 _meters_ of the intended site - could there be a unit confusion (m / mi) somewhere in the press chain? https://www.intuitivemachines.com/im-2

250 meters is very respectable for a first try. Apollo 14 and 12 achieved 30 meters and 163 meters with human piloting, respectively, and that's after the program made precision landing a high-effort mission goal. The automated missions of the 60s-70s were often off target by a kilometre or more, but Surveyor 3 came in within 200 meters as well in '67. Japan did a mission in 2024 with the express purpose of achieving…

Is 50 year old technology and expertise a good standard for comparison for modern tech?

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#103

Post by adriand »

bombcar wrote: post #82
LeoPanthera wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The order of adjectives in English is usually: opinion, size, age or shape, colour, origin, material, purpose It is sometimes difficult to classify adjectives this way, but "private" is probably opinion and "robotic" is probably purpose, so you are correct, "private robotic spacecraft" is probably correct. The problem with English, of course, is that you can figure out what someone means, even if they jumble all thei…

Private large old round blue American metallic robotic spaceship. Sounds a bit wrong, I want to put American first.

> Sounds a bit wrong, I want to put American first.

That would require labelling the spacecraft transgender, then cutting its budget.

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#104

Post by johnyzee »

sho_hn wrote: post #24
nine_k wrote: post #2

One similarly structured craft (thin and tall) reached the Moon a year ago, and also eventually toppled. Maybe next missions will feature less tower-shaped designs and more crab-shaped designs, at least during the landing phase.

Which gives me great amusement about the current human spaceflight plan to land upright Starship on the moon, and lower astronauts from the top of what is effectively a tower-like 13-story building (52.1m without landing legs, at 9m tube width) using some kind of elevator solution. To put things into perspective, this is roughly the same height as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and with landing legs extended probably abo…

If they can control the angle of each leg with enough precision, that might be enough to compensate for (slightly) uneven terrain.

I understand that the recently successful Blue Ghost has sensors to detect suitability of the landing spot, and used it to re-position twice while landing. Starship would probably need something like that, too.

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#105

Post by JoeAltmaier »

arccy wrote: post #92
dreamcompiler wrote: post #78

Good advice: 1. Never invade Russia in winter. 2. Make sure your robotic lunar lander has a low center of gravity.

when gravity is 1/6, a lower centre of gravity might not do as much as you think

I think that is entirely irrelevant. It just changes the speed of the topple. Does not affect at all the tendency to tip over?

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#106

Post by mmooss »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #51
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time a bunch of nerds failed 3 times in a row while launching small rockets from an atoll. Some 20 years later they are now 13k+ nerds, they're launching every other day, land their boosters and are slowly becoming an ISP with a rocket launching side business. Space is hard. There's nothing "embarrassing" in controlled landing on the freakin Moon with a shoestring budget, even if the landers fell over. Re…

> Once upon a time a bunch of nerds failed 3 times in a row while launching small rockets from an atoll Once upon a time most planes crashed. Then the state of the art advanced. If IM can’t publish a convincing root-cause analysis for why their landers keep tipping over while their competitors’ don’t, they shouldn’t get new contracts and existing ones should be revisited.

I thought the same, but ...

1) private companies landing on the moon is a brand new thing in a very difficult technology. If we want to encourage it, maybe we should minimize risk.

2) what were their mission goals? Maybe it was just to stick the landing, test landing gear, etc. (There is a bunch of equipment on there for other things, so they must have had some other plans.)

3) what is the difference between a private company and NASA doing it? That is, why is it so hard to do what NASA did over 50 years ago, without things falling over, etc.? Is it budget? Time for testing and retesting (investors want returns)? Talent? Is NASA witholding its secret ingredients like a self-centered chef? (At least some national space agencies also have had problems, like JAXA, but I'm not sure how widespread that is.)

Edit: I would make it competitive, though. That's the point of private business - it can fail and disappear. Compete for the next contract.

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#107

Post by kristianp »

itishappy wrote: post #62
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spaceship [ sic ] fiasco will delay Artemis Artemis II is entirely delayed by Lockheed’s Orion spacecraft. Not SpaceX’s Starship.

I wouldn't say entirely. Starship isn't going to be involved in Artemis II, but Artemis III supposed to take humans to the moon in December 2025. Nobody's on schedule.

That artemis III date is very old. Artimis II is now scheduled to take place no earlier than April 2026 [1].

III is scheduled for mid 2027, and will be delayed further as time passes [2].

1. https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-ii/

2. https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-iii/

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#108

Post by colechristensen »

mikeyouse wrote: post #13

Kind of passed over in the discussion of the science and toppling - but did they give any idea why it landed 250 miles from its intended landing site? Seems like a really large error?

> Seems like a really large error?

At one point during its transit the spacecraft will have been going about 23,000 miles per hour, suddenly 250 miles doesn't seem like much. Though obviously that's in the middle of the trip and plenty of things happen between the transit between the earth and moon and landing.

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#109

Post by card_zero »

mhink wrote: post #90
jchw wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, as a native speaker. It's a known phenomena[1], though I'm not sure in this case what type of adjective you'd classify "private" as. [1]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adj...

I'll grant that it definitely sounds ambiguous, but I actually think the phrasing "robotic private spacecraft" is more correct in the end. I think this is a fair analogy: suppose we were talking about a "private detective". If we were writing a sci-fi book, we might talk about a "robotic private detective", but "private robotic detective" would sound odd. Now, I'll grant that "private detective" has a lot more cultur…

Yeah, private detective is an open compound:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)

At least I think that's the right term (I hunted around for one that fits). So, is private spacecraft also a compound? Is it idiomatic? Maybe. Another example is little black dress, where "my new little black dress" sounds right and "my little new black dress" seems to refer to a different kind of garment.

Re: Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

#110

Post by bawolff »

bombcar wrote: post #82
LeoPanthera wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The order of adjectives in English is usually: opinion, size, age or shape, colour, origin, material, purpose It is sometimes difficult to classify adjectives this way, but "private" is probably opinion and "robotic" is probably purpose, so you are correct, "private robotic spacecraft" is probably correct. The problem with English, of course, is that you can figure out what someone means, even if they jumble all thei…

Private large old round blue American metallic robotic spaceship. Sounds a bit wrong, I want to put American first.

Otoh, if you cut out some - "old american spaceship" sounds fine to me, where "american old spaceship" does not (or it makes it sound like "american old" is a brand name)
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