So: first attempt to get to the moon (by them, who are not quite USA or China) and they just fail at the very end. Like getting a silver medal at the Olympics. Yes, sad. But man!
With a population of < 3% of the USA, < 1% of China.
Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appears to End in Crash
21–30 of 219 posts
Re: Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appears to End in Crash
#22Do I detect a bit of condescension in NYT's tone? Do we need to remind the numerous failures US & USSR had before they got their space program off the ground? Also, they forgot India who did send a lunar orbiter and sent a probe on Moon's surface back in 2008.
Re: Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appears to End in Crash
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you're floating along on a stable orbit not about to impact the surface. Or with more time to recover from the outage before landing. If it happens within the last minute (wild estimation) then you have little time to recover the lost velocity.
When you are floating along on a stable orbit the engines are off, so it's quite hard to have a failure in this context.
Maybe the failure occurs as you are initiating acceleration burn, while you are in stable orbit.
Re: Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appears to End in Crash
#24It's time to retire the tired old nation-state space-race narrative. We're all in this together people. Their failure is our failure.
I'm as about as happy for them as I would have been for Germany during 30s and 40s.
Re: Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appears to End in Crash
#25I was just watching it live, cheering for SpaceIL, it's a pity that the landing was not successful. I was part of the engineering team of the Japanese team Hakuto of the Google Lunar XPRIZE. I always wondered how it would feel to be in the control room at this time, but our launch deal fell through. I can understand what the SpaceIL engineers are going through right now. Congratulations to all the SpaceIL team for re…
Maybe not a success this time, but a lot will be learned. These types of failures are now we learn, adapt, and move forward.
Re: Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appears to End in Crash
#26> On the way down, the main engine cut out. The engine was successfully restarted, but then communications were cut off, and no more information was sent back. Definitely a terrible time to have an engine failure :/
When is it not a terrible time to have an engine failure?
While parked on the surface.
Re: Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appears to End in Crash
#27> On the way down, the main engine cut out. The engine was successfully restarted, but then communications were cut off, and no more information was sent back. Definitely a terrible time to have an engine failure :/
Based on the telemetry from the broadcast it seems that there was a failure at 13km that resulted in both telemetry and engine loss. When telemetry connection came back vertical speed has already doubled and it kept going up until spacecraft hit the ground. Engine was probably never restarted.
Edit1: Telemetry came back at 10k. For the next minute and a half there was uncertainty about the main engine even though telemetry clearly showed vertical speed going up fast. More then a minute later, at 5k a reset request was made.
Edit2: A minute goes by and at about 500m controller asked if there is a confirmation to send rest to JPL, another, announced that engine is on. Crash happens at that moment. 149m, 134.3ms vertical.
Re: Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appears to End in Crash
#28It's time to retire the tired old nation-state space-race narrative. We're all in this together people. Their failure is our failure.
Agree to disagree here. The whole "we're all one people thing" is a great idea and all (I'm a huge fan, would love for the U.N. to be something other than the personification of national relations and instead be a real governing body) but that's not how things work.
This is Israel's project. They had assistance from other organizations/countries, but they're not doing this to better North Korea in any real way and you shouldn't hold North Korean responsible for their failure.
Re: Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appears to End in Crash
#29So: first attempt to get to the moon (by them, who are not quite USA or China) and they just fail at the very end. Like getting a silver medal at the Olympics. Yes, sad. But man!
The Michael Collins of lunar trips.
Re: Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appears to End in Crash
#30It's time to retire the tired old nation-state space-race narrative. We're all in this together people. Their failure is our failure.
[deleted]