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Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

theguardian.com

121–130 of 165 posts

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#121
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even that easy in KSP!

Once you get the hang of it, it becomes pretty simple. Just keep pointed retrograde and you'll probably be fine (assuming you start your final landing burn soon enough).

It's easy when you're playing with a mod that calculates time to suicide burn for you. Otherwise, you'd better overbuild the lander, as you'll need that extra Δv for "pumping the brakes", so to speak.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#122

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…

If you were talking about the science mission directorate you’d be right on. They’re doing good work with the money they’re allocated. The exploration directorate, on the other hand, with their billion dollar rocket to nowhere…

You mean the billion dollar "cost of doing science in a democratic country" / "jobs program" Senate Launch System?

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#123
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read up on restarting Stinger production. Retired engineers had to pitch in to train the current generation. So I wouldn't say "totally fine".

How is needing to train young people the same as deindustrialization exactly?

It's the taking engineers out of retirement that's deindustrialization. A properly industrialized nation would have an active program with educators in the prime of their career to do the educating, and not need to pull someone out of retirement because there wasn't a need for them to train their replacements until after they'd retired.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So was the invasion of Ukraine, the usage of chemical weapons in Syria, and the enhanced interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib. Outlawed by international treaty doesn’t mean all that much.

None of your examples are commercial.

Yes they, absolutely, were… but even if that was a coherent counterpoint — your argument seems to now be that the international mechanisms for policing crimes against commercial interests are inherently stronger, more robust, and effective than the international mechanisms for policing crimes against humanity — international treaties also ban copyright infringement, overfishing, and pollution.

Clearly, none of those are happening.

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#125
post #86

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 :)

[deleted]

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So was the invasion of Ukraine, the usage of chemical weapons in Syria, and the enhanced interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib. Outlawed by international treaty doesn’t mean all that much.

None of your examples are commercial.

You mean like this ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2tncMtbmqw

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#128
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.

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?

[dead]

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#129
post #74

Earlier 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.

> proof is in the pudding. The pudding is that NASA of 2024 has no human space flight capability

Stupidity and ignorance sometimes tread into troll territory.

Nobody has gone back to the Moon since America. That’s not because of a simultaneous global coma. It’s because nobody bothered. If your understanding of aeronautics and mechanics is so base as to propose that we, America, cannot lap what we did in the 60s today, there might be better reading material available than anecdotes [1].

If your complaint is literally a private v public one, that’s beyond me and my cat.

[1] https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Aerospace_Engineering...

Re: Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon

#130

I am super curious to know what kind of software magic they did to bring the NDL system as the primary navigation system after their own system failed to function prior to landing .. From what I understood listening in to the broadcast, NDL was only a demonstration project and folks somehow managed to bring it up on demand and use 2 of the sensors on it (?) iirc .. Like how !? Was NDL set up in the same orientation a…

Yes it sounds like they had to do some MacGyver level stuff at the last minute. As I understand it NDL (Navigation Doppler Lidar) was a NASA project bundled aboard the craft as a non-mission-critical demo but when the main naviagation failed they had to send a patch to the craft (about two hours before landing) to activate NDL and use it as the main navigation. Hoping more details come out about this.
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