191–200 of 360 posts
If a space probe falls on the moon, does it make a sound?
No, sound needs a medium to pass through and there isn't (ok fine, yes there is, but it's not sufficient) an atmosphere on the moon. Interesting philosophical questions though :)
Now, stuff like that spoon-feed with honey every conspiracy theorist that says/writes that we (humans) never actually went to the moon blah blah blah. My thoughts about it is that.. 'hey we got tech to stream live the whole thing... from lift off to landing, with 10 cameras to each direction. I remember watching live the "Red Bull Stratos" and it was soooooooooo cool!!!!!! Why not to the moon??? How come we went to t…
The IM-1 mission was about 100 million dollars, a single Saturn V launch was more than a billion. Total Apollo budget for Apollo (6 crewed landings and a few manned missions for testing, and some uncrewed test flights) was 260 billion in todays money.
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?
250 miles? The mission official website of Intuitive Machines says 250 meters. From https://www.intuitivemachines.com/im-2 > HOUSTON, TX – March 7, 2025 – Intuitive Machines, Inc. (Nasdaq: LUNR, LUNRW) (“Intuitive Machines”) (“Company”), a leading space exploration, infrastructure, and services company, has announced the IM-2 mission lunar lander, Athena, landed 250 meters from its intended landing site in the Mons M…
It's so easy to design vehicles that can't roll over on their backs and die like a turtle. All you need to do is use large wagon-wheels and put the cargo/payload near the axles of it, where it doesn't extend above the top of the wheel. Then the device can continue to work as well upside down as right-side-up. In other words, it has no such thing as upside down. There are lots of robots like this now, where if they ge…
They should've watched more battlebots.
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Shit, NASA does space stuff, it fails sometimes! Do we want to only fund things we know to be 100% easy to do? And don't fucking tell me, "we already landed on the moon once, how hard can it be?" because this shit is really fucking hard and takes lots of cash and a lot of what apppears to be "waste" or "failure" on a first order approximation, but in reality is actually "learned knowledge". I can't believe people thi…
I don’t make comments based on what I want to happen An entire federal agency was deleted and thousands of non profits and other organizations were using the funding source as their only client and are also deleted now Just because this one is publicly traded we should expect a different outcome? I love prediction markets because now there is another outlet for perceiving politics than just debating. I take your mone…
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“Private” isn’t describing the spacecraft per se , but the ownership of the spacecraft. “Privately-owned robotic spacecraft” is the “full” phrase, of which we elide part of the adjective.[0] Here, “privately-owned” is ORIGIN in that list, which puts it before TYPE. [0] “Privately owned”, while on its own an adverb and verb, is functioning as a singular adjective in the larger phrase. Edit: Previously said “funded”, n…
The spacecraft is privately owned, as the company is private, but I don't know that I would say that it is privately funded. NASA paid tens of millions of dollars, not just for delivering a payload (paying for a product/service), but for development of the lunar hopper, Grace, which was an award/grant.
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You are likely aware of the English language's feature of multiple adjectives (that are modifying the same noun) needing to appear in a certain order to sound "correct". So for example "yellow big balloon" sounds wrong but "big yellow balloon" sounds right. This is because SIZE is supposed to come before COLOR in standard English phrases. In this case, "robotic" and "private" could be similar enough in category to be…
“Private” isn’t describing the spacecraft per se , but the ownership of the spacecraft. “Privately-owned robotic spacecraft” is the “full” phrase, of which we elide part of the adjective.[0] Here, “privately-owned” is ORIGIN in that list, which puts it before TYPE. [0] “Privately owned”, while on its own an adverb and verb, is functioning as a singular adjective in the larger phrase. Edit: Previously said “funded”, n…
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I am not a native English speaker (or English native speaker, ;)), but I've been using it forever...but didn't know there was an official adjective ordering.
The order of adjectives was never taught in K-12. It seems to be followed naturally by native English speakers without much thought until the order isn't followed. Then it sounds weird but most native speakers wouldn't be able to tell you why.
Not being critical here, just a question from my curious naivety (lunar exploration is hard): these landers seem spindly and unforgiving, landing-wise. Are there bouncy ball type craft that could be made, or something that can reorient or push itself up after landing? I have a vague memory of something like that being used on Mars.
With the landing probe encased in airbags ejecting from the main body a couple meter above ground. The probe the rolled for a bit, once it stopped it then opened up and started doing science.
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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…
I'm curious how that would apply in this case Imagine a restaurant that sells french fries. They offer two kinds of fries, one with physically large fries (like steak fries) and the other with physically small fries (like shoestring fries). They call these "large" fries and "small" fries. You can order a large quantity of fries or a small quantity of fries, giving 4 possible orders: large large fries, large small fri…
Perhaps something like “jumbo fries” or “mini fries” or something more creative.