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Athena landed in a dark crater where the temperature was -280° F / -173° C

arstechnica.com

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Re: Athena landed in a dark crater where the temperature was -280° F / -173° C

#11

Post by dylan604 »

areoform wrote: post #9

If you take the time to study the documentation from the 1950s & 1960s, the engineering culture of that era appears to be markedly different from the engineering culture prevalent today. And I think it's deeply rooted in the symbiotic relationship between computing, Baumol's cost disease and our obsession with precision, results-oriented, MBA-style-min-maxing, "good enough for government work" engineering. Robert Tru…

> Perhaps it is to save on mass and power so that more payload reaches the surface.

It doesn't matter how much mass was saved and how much more payload that allowed to reach the surface if the landing isn't successful. Successful landing is mandatory for anything else to matter. The obviousness of this baffles me that it is taken so haphazardly.

Re: Athena landed in a dark crater where the temperature was -280° F / -173° C

#12

Post by j_bum »

areoform wrote: post #9

If you take the time to study the documentation from the 1950s & 1960s, the engineering culture of that era appears to be markedly different from the engineering culture prevalent today. And I think it's deeply rooted in the symbiotic relationship between computing, Baumol's cost disease and our obsession with precision, results-oriented, MBA-style-min-maxing, "good enough for government work" engineering. Robert Tru…

This reads like a “comment” version of Destin’s speech to a NASA group a few years ago [0]. The loss of institutional knowledge and fundamentals philosophical differences seem like they’ll need to be overcome.

[0] https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?si=EUxpp6C9vRAYD3kA

Re: Athena landed in a dark crater where the temperature was -280° F / -173° C

#13

Post by somenameforme »

areoform wrote: post #9

If you take the time to study the documentation from the 1950s & 1960s, the engineering culture of that era appears to be markedly different from the engineering culture prevalent today. And I think it's deeply rooted in the symbiotic relationship between computing, Baumol's cost disease and our obsession with precision, results-oriented, MBA-style-min-maxing, "good enough for government work" engineering. Robert Tru…

> "I think we've become so accustomed to living in a silicon driven world where our personal devices are engineered at microscopic level that we've forgotten how to do things the Apollo-era way."

This is a really interesting point. I think a practical issue in modern times as well is that companies are being inspired by SpaceX while forgetting that it took SpaceX alot of work to get to the point of being able to do things like casually land a 20 story tower in the middle of the ocean on a barge, let alone the even more ridiculous 'stunts' they're doing with Starship.

Apollo was starting from the perspective of trying to do something where it was even debatable about whether it was possible. And so I think there was a lot more 'humility' in design, for lack of a better word.

Re: Athena landed in a dark crater where the temperature was -280° F / -173° C

#14

Post by jjmarr »

areoform wrote: post #9

If you take the time to study the documentation from the 1950s & 1960s, the engineering culture of that era appears to be markedly different from the engineering culture prevalent today. And I think it's deeply rooted in the symbiotic relationship between computing, Baumol's cost disease and our obsession with precision, results-oriented, MBA-style-min-maxing, "good enough for government work" engineering. Robert Tru…

You're criticizing the prioritization of cost, not the concept of trying to solve for constraints. Engineering is about constrained optimization to meet customer needs.[1] Learning this is a core part of the curriculum at my accredited engineering school.

> Engineering design is a process of making informed decisions to creatively devise products, systems, components, or processes to meet specified goals based on engineering analysis and judgement. The process is often characterized as complex, open-ended, iterative, and multidisciplinary. Solutions incorporate natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering science, using systematic and current best practices to satisfy defined objectives within identified requirements, criteria and constraints.

> Constraints to be considered may include (but are not limited to): health and safety, sustainability, environmental, ethical, security, economic, aesthetics and human factors, feasibility and compliance with regulatory aspects, along with universal design issues such as societal, cultural and diversification facets.

It's not an MBA philosophy but is intrinsic to the profession. Apollo didn't go up because of vibes, it went up because engineers knew the goals going in and to figured out how much fuel was needed to go to the moon. It also went up because the United States was willing to spend over a quarter of a trillion dollars (adjusted for inflation) on getting there,[2] and ignored the arguments that it was a giant waste of money while there were social problems at home.[3]

[1]https://egad.engineering.queensu.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/...

[2] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon

Re: Athena landed in a dark crater where the temperature was -280° F / -173° C

#16

Post by areoform »

jjmarr wrote: post #14
areoform wrote: post #9

If you take the time to study the documentation from the 1950s & 1960s, the engineering culture of that era appears to be markedly different from the engineering culture prevalent today. And I think it's deeply rooted in the symbiotic relationship between computing, Baumol's cost disease and our obsession with precision, results-oriented, MBA-style-min-maxing, "good enough for government work" engineering. Robert Tru…

You're criticizing the prioritization of cost, not the concept of trying to solve for constraints. Engineering is about constrained optimization to meet customer needs.[1] Learning this is a core part of the curriculum at my accredited engineering school. > Engineering design is a process of making informed decisions to creatively devise products, systems, components, or processes to meet specified goals based on eng…

This comment isn't directed at you jjmarr, I appreciate your take, but I think it's important to point out that,

    > constrained optimization to meet customer needs
is MBA-capture in action.

For most of its existence as a formal field, engineering wasn't about making geegaws that "meet customer needs." It was about building stuff that matters. Houses that didn't collapse. Roads and machines that made it possible to traverse vast distances. Toys that delighted us. Aquaducts that delivered clean water. Drainage that helped remove muck. Plumbing that cleaned our cities. Threshers that helped us harvest crops. Lights that vanquished the dark.

The story of engineering is the story of creating technology that helps alleviate want.

You can say that there was a "customer" for each, which is great and all, but that's not why we did it. We did it so that we could move out of the caves and not be in filth and muck all the time.

We did it because it felt good. And we did it because it was the right thing to do.

Re: Athena landed in a dark crater where the temperature was -280° F / -173° C

#17

Post by ck2 »

Kinda explain why Neil Armstrong burned up all their fuel except for a few seconds scoping out the landing site in paranoia.

Instead of building all these expensive to launch big landers, why not get some pizza-box sized probes into earth orbit AND THEN do like a slo-mo golf shot arcing to where the moon will be for a super slow/soft landing?

Some will fail but if you launch 100 and get 20-30 working, there you go.

As technology progresses, get it down to a shoe-box sized probe and then in 10 years smartphone sized (in 100 years tic-tac sized).

Re: Athena landed in a dark crater where the temperature was -280° F / -173° C

#19

Post by ordu »

dylan604 wrote: post #11
areoform wrote: post #9

If you take the time to study the documentation from the 1950s & 1960s, the engineering culture of that era appears to be markedly different from the engineering culture prevalent today. And I think it's deeply rooted in the symbiotic relationship between computing, Baumol's cost disease and our obsession with precision, results-oriented, MBA-style-min-maxing, "good enough for government work" engineering. Robert Tru…

> Perhaps it is to save on mass and power so that more payload reaches the surface. It doesn't matter how much mass was saved and how much more payload that allowed to reach the surface if the landing isn't successful. Successful landing is mandatory for anything else to matter. The obviousness of this baffles me that it is taken so haphazardly.

I believe that the thing you are missing is Intuitive Machines aims at landing a lot of spacecrafts, not just one. They hope to have a limited number of failures to land which will teach them how to do it reliably. We might doubt will this work or not, but if we accept the plan then it becomes a rational decision to increase the engineering complexity and risks of failure by saving on mass, because in the long run less missions will allow to land more payload.

Though, of course, I wonder how many landings they are planning to do, and how many of them they need to do to compensate for each failure to land.

Re: Athena landed in a dark crater where the temperature was -280° F / -173° C

#20

Post by btbuildem »

ck2 wrote: post #17

Kinda explain why Neil Armstrong burned up all their fuel except for a few seconds scoping out the landing site in paranoia. Instead of building all these expensive to launch big landers, why not get some pizza-box sized probes into earth orbit AND THEN do like a slo-mo golf shot arcing to where the moon will be for a super slow/soft landing? Some will fail but if you launch 100 and get 20-30 working, there you go. A…

Combine that with leaving the long-range comms (and higher-powered equipment) in lunar orbit as the "master" for all the probes scattered on the surface, and maybe the problem becomes simpler by breaking it in two.
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