I am currently reading the gorgeous Folio Society edition of the A Man on the Moon
The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin (worth a buy from https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/a-man-on-the-moon.html if you a) like the topic and b) have 235.00).
I just finished the book 1 which ends with well known Apollo 13 disaster and the RCA of the explosion is that the liquid O2 tank for the fuel cell was intended for Apollo 10, but was removed for modifications, and during that was dropped about 5cm, a "minor jolt, but enough to damage the tube assembly used to fill and empty the tank". As part of testing - and under full, and capable supervision of NASA astronauts and mission control - the tank was filled and tested, and would refuse to drain fully due to the tube assembly being in the way. Alternative procedure to empty it was to heat it with the internal heater and have the liquid O2 simply evaporate. BUT! The heater inside was originally spec'ed to use 28V, but was upgraded to 65V, and everything in it was redesigned to do so, EXCEPT the thermostat inside the tank itself. The thermostat was supposed to provide temperature control and shut the heating process off if temperatures exceed things. Well, during that ground draining operation the 65V fried the thermostat, and the temp gauge on the ground only went up to 85 degrees. The insides of the tank went up to a 1000, which cracked the insulation on the wires of the motor designed to stir the tank, and those arced while in transit to moon and boom, made that mission what it was.
So yeah, space is hard. I am sure the mission people for the lander will do their design review and I look forward to their findings.
2 pages of the book are dedicated to this. This was reviewed for 2 weeks by dozens of dedicated people, and was signed off by everyone on the mission control and mission commanders. Absolutely fantastic writing and I am sure a distillation of 100s of pages of RCA notes.
Because the damaged pipe was only IIRC used to drain fuel on the launch pad and had no in-flight role. The subsequent explosion happened because the drain-fuel workaround they used on the ground had the unfortunate side effect of melting some wiring insulation in an oxygen tank
Many failures of complex systems originate in fabrication / maintenance rather than in operation. Flights are doomed from the start due to such defects.
The Columbia disaster is a partial exception --- the proximate triggering factor occurred during (very early) flight, but a deeper-cause analysis would include factors that originated on the ground in design, operations, and assessments of earlier incidents.
And also typically occurring on the ground / before the flight. Even where considerations such as crew resource management / cultures of deference (still a factor in recent air incidents, see Asiana 214 in 2013, for example).
Which itself encompasses a whole slew of factors: false beliefs, groupthink, politics, cultures of fear (or simply conformity), etc., etc.
What I find most interesting about discussions of all of these is that they are so broadly applicable, and are often the parts of incident post morta which are most generalisable to other domains and situations.
> Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
I would direct you to another Sagan quote as part of Wanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist : https://vimeo.com/108650530
For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.
Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…”
Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds— promising untold opportunities—beckon.
You can scratch this itch by emigrating: I left Normandy for Hong Kong 8 years ago, and it still feels like I'm living on Mars lol
It's true that nothing beats the feeling of being lost, rebuilding a nest elsewhere, to have people around you who cant possibly understand you unless you spend large effort studying their ways and speech, the constant underlying fear it can all end tomorrow kicking your ass into giving your maximum everyday.
If you cant go to Mars, move to a Chinese city, it's the next best thing.
I feel like in the 'cynicism' that's popular in tech circles like this about tech as a career, we tend to forget that many people's passions don't really have a lot to do with wanting to be famous or rich. This is to the point that we apparently can't fathom that someone simply wants to do something without any special stereotypically grand aspirations.
Even in tech, some portion of people chose it for the money and some chose it purely as a passion, such that they would've chosen it even if there wasn't as much money to be made. I know that I would still be pursuing the same career even if I didn't get to work on the things I am currently working on.
Remember that plenty of people work 'boring' jobs like garbage collection, being a janitor, being a soldier or riskier stuff with even worse conditions. Many of them are perfectly content with that as long as that doesn't get in the way of things that are important to them.
So it's entirely reasonable that many people would genuinely be willing to happily sacrifice everything to go to Mars, simply for the sake of being there, regardless of any potential glamourous outcomes.
I don't think non-explorers really understand explorers. There were other people on Captain Cook's voyage and other people on Columbus's. Taking a shot at long odds is about knowing that you may fail.
Lorisks want certainty and knowledge that they may not fail.
Hirisks hope for uncertainty and the chance that they may succeed wildly.
It is built in to a Hirisk's belief system that they may fail. But while a Lorisk might find it cringy to try and fail, a Hirisk won't.
You won't really get it if you're not a Hirisk because you think "well what if I end up taking out the trash in a frozen desert" and they think "well what if I actually find or do something amazing".
Sometimes you end up proving H. pylori or inventing cardiac catheterization and other times you go down in history as the guy who thought he invented the parachute and learned otherwise on the way down from the Eiffel Tower or worse, you don't go down in history at all.
The closest experience to what living in space that can be experienced on earth is living on a submarine. Working with advanced tech in an environment where everything is trying to kill you, logistics challenges to maintain operation, schedule completely dictated for you, etc. But ask many people who want to live on Mars if they would go on a long underway on a submarine, and they don't seem to excited by the idea. I don't think people really think about the day to day operations, but jump on the fame/historical significance being one of the settlers on the moon or mars.
It's kind of a moot issue anyway. I hope that a few human explorers will visit the Moon and Mars in the coming decades (and there will be no shortage of volunteers), but the notion of sending settlers there in our lifetimes is a total fantasy. Even if orbital launch costs come way down, the cost of protecting settlers (i.e. at least several dozen permanent inhabitants) from radiation exposure and toxic dust will be so high that no government or corporation could afford it.
Indeed. It seems to be somewhat independent of political ideology as well.
There’s a couple screenshots floating around of some old Twitter threads: “what would your role be in a Communist society?” - where virtually every single reply was stuff like “valued author of liberation poetry and group leader of mindfulness sessions”
And then on the other side of the compass, you have the hordes of disaffected single young men glorifying the idealized “working the frontier with a wife and kids”, seemingly unaware/unconcerned that the average experience for young men was to die horribly, alone and unmourned.
Everyone is the main character of their own story, I guess.
We can’t stay here forever. This planet is 4.5 billion years old and has 1 billion years left. That’s assuming that our species will be able to survive so long.
The ChatGPT, which will take over from us, according to HN, in 5 years, will find a way to reheat the core, or at least to explain convincingly that cold is cool.
At least I would have a reasonable assumption of breathable air, a fresh water source, flora and fauna I can gather and hunt to eat, and likely arable land that I can use to grow additional food sources from. Space and planets we can visit has absolutely none of these things.
> Space and planets we can visit has absolutely none of these things.
Because of that, you'll be carrying with you sources of better breathable air, fresher water, and food that's much less likely to kill you or escape you. At least early on, before the market pressure reduces aforementioned consumables to lowest possible quality still able to sustain some degree of life.
While this is true, it doesn’t address sustainability of a settlement. Sure, many pioneers carried some rations with them and known good water, but at certain point, you will need to obtain resources from your environment.
The most salient problem here, however, is that the quality of each resource is of little concern if I end up running out of it for whatever reason and there is only a limited exit strategy.
Earth is an island among a vast amount of inhospitable nothingness sprinkled with the occasional dead rock or gargantuan ball of toxic gas orbiting a fireball blasting out photons that degrade our materials and the DNA in our cells. Early earth-bound pioneers of “new” lands could be confident that they could at least breath the air, but this environment is confirmed only to exist on planet earth for now.
Yup, even in person i.e without zooming, the moon looks way smaller when in the middle of the sky; yet on the horizon amongst man made structures it can look bigger... measure it with your thumb and it's the same size - context changes our perception.
We don't know the field of view of the lens (or crop) being used here, so you can't say anything about the apparent size of objects. With a smaller FoV lens, or even just a tighter crop, the Earth could look significantly larger.
If you took a normal snapshot of a scene on Earth with a typical 55 degree field of view lens (e.g. your smartphone's 1X lens) I think you'd be quite surprised by how small the Moon appears in your photo.
When viewed from the moon, the earth's diameter subtends an angle of about 0.033 radians. On the other hand, if the photo was taken from an orbital altitude of 100km, then the lunar horizon is about 600km away from the viewpoint (using Pythagoras' theorem).
So at the horizon, a crater the same apparent size as the earth would be roughly 0.033 * 600 = 20 km across.
German national/public broadcasting service ARD reported the lunar lander has successfully landed while they watched a rendered animation[0] (from the perspective of the surface of the moon!!). Can't make this shit up.
The US Government tried to get Twentieth Century Fox and other studious involved but they were risk adverse after a series of big budget flops and financial problems. Von Braun's joking suggestion of shooting on location was inexplicably taken up. It would have involved sending six Saturn V moon rockets to moon with flim crews and sets. But due to cost overruns and the run up the Vietnam war it was reduced to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin shooting home movies of each other.
Not necessarily. We've frequently been able to determine the cause of unmanned spacecraft failures via telemetry and/or post-failure investigation. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter famously failed because NASA used metric and a vendor did not.
Or another example, ESA's ExoMars lander cut its parachute and deployed itself 3.7 km above ground due to IMU saturation, thinking it was already landed.
As a former mechanical engineer, any calculations involving pounds in any form I pretty much always converted to metric and then back at the end if need-be. The trinity of pound-mass, pound-force, and slugs is incredibly easy to screw up--at least as a student.
Admittedly, engineers are pretty much the only people making calculations with those kind of units and they generally use metric as far as I know. I went to school a long time ago and there were probably enough legacy imperial units hanging around that it seemed worthwhile to at least be exposed to examples you wouldn't have encountered in day to day living.
Since the 60s, America has literally been officially a conversion of standard SI units. A yard is defined as most of a meter (exactly 0.9144 meters) and an inch is derived from that.
Since the 60s? The yard measurement dates to sometime before the Norman invasion of England. And it's not even used that widely in the US outside of some specific contexts like sports. A gallon, from which a quart is derived is of a similar vintage. Without digging into history, I assume some SI volume and length measurements roughly mirrored existing Imperial units as opposed to the other way round.
The point is that the American units are now defined relative to metric units.
As recently as the 1800s, the yard was defined as:
"the Straight Line or Distance between the Centres of the Two Points in the Gold Studs of the Straight Brass Rod now in the Custody of the Clerk of the House of Commons whereon the Words and Figures "Standard Yard 1760" are engraved"
... That standard yard was destroyed in a fire in 1834, and a new standard yard was made using several copies of the original standard yard as reference.
But now, it's just defined as an exact fraction of a meter. First as 36/39.370113 m, now as exactly 0.9144 meters.
It's how literally all engineering in this country was done a single generation ago. When I studied mechanical engineering it was all units like slugs and foot-pound-second.
> A slug is defined as the mass that is accelerated by 1 ft/s2 when a net force of one pound (lbf) is exerted on it.[2] One slug is a mass equal to 32.1740 lb
this is like if you tried to explain the difference between a newton and a kilogram to an alien an they didn't quite get it
It's not that complicated. A slug is the Imperial unit of mass, like the kilogram. It's just that while in metric the unit of mass is primary and the unit of force (Newton) is derived, in foot-pound-second it is the reverse. Pounds is a fundamental unit of force and the slug is derived.
This is true colloquially. In engineering (or at least aerospace engineering, which is what I was studying) we more generally used slugs for mass in our calculations. Gravity/weight isn’t always constant after all, even on earth.
Not universally. We still talked about a rocket’s “pounds of thrust.” But for things like angular momentum, center of gravity, etc. those were usually calculated with slugs.
Aerospace engineering is still a mix of both units. Especially on the aeronautics side, imperial is still widely used. Part of the reason for this is that past reference materials and tooling at many manufacturers still using imperial tooling. A team of good engineers is expected to be proficient with both unit systems --- its not really a big deal to use imperial on projects.
Im American but have heard it’s common for 2-by imperial lumber units be used in Canada and uk for example. But metric would be used for cuts (which i think is easier often too)
Given a 2x4 is 1.75 by 3.75 inches, it sure doesn't make using Imperial measure any easier than metric. It's more that certain demographics are oppositional-defiant when it comes to change and they tend to make up the "base" of a powerful political parry.
Many years ago, probably about 40 years or so, I remember my dad pointing out plasterboard in the building supplies store that was marked as 1200mm x 8'6", because standard UK ceilings are 8'6" but everything else (kitchen units and appliances for example) are in multiples of 600mm...
According to the doppler telemetry analysis on Twitter, it entered free fall 90 seconds before loss of signal. So presumably the engine cut out and they have telemetry data to determine why. Most likely explanation: insufficient fuel.
> ispace engineers monitored the estimated remaining propellant reached at the lower threshold and shortly afterward the descent speed rapidly increased
> That’s how you go from proof of concept to economic viability
I don't think this is particularly coherent in this case. It's commercial, but there is no private sector customer.
All of the customers are government scientific agencies. It's all still very much science and/or nation-state prestige-driven. What's more, it's unclear what the commercial case for lunar landing would be in the near term, where "near term" means "any reasonable expectation of return on capital that doesn't come from taxpayers".
That’s a fair criticism, but one important distinction is that this develops infrastructure and expertise for purely economically/recreationally motivated projects down the line.
As for economic motivations in the near term, a lot I can think of are indeed still based on public funds, but one important thing about commercial landing being viable is that those publically funded endeavors don’t need to work the bureaucracy engine to get a government launch/can span governmental boundaries. If some US or UAE entity wants a telescope array on the moon, if they have the money for it, they could just pay for a commercial lunar lander. If the DOE wants to test he-3 mining they don’t need to go through congress to get NASA to deliver their payload.
It was a commercial craft carrying a payload from a few sources, including a rover from JAXA, the Japanese space agency, and a second rover built by the UAE.
Most of the US fleet is now commercial as well, and they're doing plenty of science on NASA's behalf. This is the future. Or we'd be stuck with one SLS launch every decade instead.
Just because it’s a commercial endeavor does not make it useless, impactful, or suggest the people behind it genuinely care about the work they are doing. I’m willing to bet people working there right now watched in awe while humans first stepped foot on the moon, or watched the first space walk, or even witnessed some of the tragedies that happened during the shuttle program, all while dreaming to be part of them next team to do something even greater.
Most of the things that have improved the human race have been done commercially, and those motivated by profit have done a hundredfold more for humanity than those who were motivated by idealism.
What if I told you that both can be true at the same time? A free market is one of the only vehicles that has allowed people to be lifted out of poverty, self determination and the freedom to decide one’s own destiny is a very profound idea that we take for granted when talking about different forms of governance that are fundamentally incompatible with that. On the other hand, we need a balance of power for the benefit and health of a society. Social safety nets, publicly beneficial infrastructure, and sensible regulations must exist, not in spite of, but to complement and protect the freedom we enjoy.
omnidirectional (or not very strongly directional like an aimed x band parabolic antenna), low data rate in bps and intentionally narrow channel size, used for spacecraft command/control/telemetry somewhere between 1200 MHz and 2000 MHz.
To sibling: Your comment was more "dog-whistling a conspiracy theory Rorschach test" than skillful commentary. I'm not surprised it got flagged, as it lacked any meaningful content or insight.
In general, you might want to leave it to others to evaluate the quality of your "commentary".
Is there an actual commercial reason for landing on the moon? What was this lander going to do? It seems like a lot of missions from various companies and countries are trying to get to the moon and they're all crashing. Is it just a rite of passage for a space program? What is the point of this
It was carrying two rovers, one from JAXA, the Japanese space agency, and the second from the UAE. This is the equiv of SpaceX launching a NASA satellite.
The big reason not much happened in space in the past was cost. The Space Shuttle ended up costing around $60,000/kg to send stuff to space. SpaceX brought that down to $2,600/kg with the Falcon 9. And if Starship lives up to its potential, you're looking at $10/kg. You literally cannot overstate the impact of that change.
Space flights costs will start to become completely viable for small companies or even individuals. And for big players, the cost of travel itself will approach 0% of total costs. So basically the future of space is going to be decided by who can most effectively leverage this new frontier that's suddenly becoming completely accessible.
In a way there are some analogs with the internet. We're in that critical early phase where really good ideas, like selling books online, should still sound pretty stupid to most people. One thing that's very different though is that the change is not even remotely linear. We're going from room-sized glorified calculators to high powered laptops, practically overnight.
> Space flights costs will start to become completely viable for small companies or even individuals.
We're already at a point where - at least using companies in the UK - it costs about the same to launch a cubesat as it does to buy a poverty-spec cloth-seats-no-aircon Ford Focus.
It's mad that I could launch a 10cm 1kg cubesat - think in terms of a bag of sugar - for so little money, and all I need to do is ring a guy a couple of hour's drive south in Glasgow and wave a credit card to do it.
It's already cheaper to fly between UK cities via Barcelona than to take the train; in ten years time it'll be cheaper to go from London to Edinburgh via the L2 Lagrange point.
That's more a factor of the price of train tickets.
It costs £40 per person to travel from Glasgow to Dundee even booking in advance, making it slightly more expensive for one journey for one person than the cheapest car I've ever bought - and roughly the same price as a tank of LPG in my old Range Rover.
Not my opinion - I saw a compelling video of some prof on reddit a few years ago. His argument went something like this: name the richest businessman from the time of Columbus/ Amerigo. Or a very powerful politician/ socialite? Progress is a derivative of us pursuing the unknown. That is why we do what we do.
Disclaimer: I've lost a lot of the language behind the original argument, but as a sceptic it did make a lot of sense to me at that time. And hopefully the meaning behind the original message has not been lost due to my bad phrasing.
Then again many still remember “Queen Isabella of Spain”. It’s hard to predict what will be famous and remembered centuries from now - Musk could be entirely successful at all he wants and does and be remembered no more than by those obsessed with early earth history.
The Wikipedia article is missing another case. A rock taken by Apollo 17 from Taurus-Littrow was gifted by Richard Nixon to Portugal in 1973. It was in exhibition at the Lisbon Planetarium but got stolen 11 July 1985.
Yeah I'm curious too. It seems like if there was actually some commercial benefit to this then USA would be dropping rovers on the moon every week. But it's mostly lost interest now.
If you're a private company looking to build a mining base station, tourist hotel, or any other thing a private company might want to do, then it's best to get the kinks worked out by practicing with an unmanned lander a few times first
Okay, but that asks the same question: What do you want to use the stuff for?
Imagine that I told you that I have a new venture to mine slate in the arctic. And when asked I would tell you that it is very expensive to transport slate from the already existing mines to the arctic, which makes the arctic mined slate that much more valuable. You would immediately see that this is true, as long as there is someone who wants slate in the arctic, and very much not true if there is nobody there who needs pretty roofs or blackboards.
You can't build anything useful or fun with slate in the arctic.
But you can set up low/zero g manufacturing on/near the moon, military installations, incredible observatories, and unique tourist facilities.
You can also set up space habs / moon bases for people to live in in the far future which would spread our bets as a species in a way that living in the arctic doesn't.
If I told you that, I'd break my NDA and lose my job. If you're so curious, go fund your own start up ;-)
I have no idea. One movie suggested H3. Others think mining water ice would be an idea. Others think you can use the regolith to 3D print stuff. I'm not the private company launching lunar landers, but I was just making up hypotheticals on why someone might want to practice landing things on the moon.
I think Artemis is largely going in the wrong direction. It's not really unfair to say the main reason it exists is to give the SLS a reason to exist. The grand ambition of Artemis is to recreate the Apollo landing (with some identity politics injected), and create a mini-ISS around the Moon. Even if you took us 10 years in the future and this was achieved (which one can very safely say it will not be), it would not be particularly relevant.
The reason I say it's the wrong direction is not only the lack of ambition, but cost! Artemis is planned to cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which is just absurd given our trajectory with space. This (back to the topic of this thread) company sent their rover to the moon on a $67 million SpaceX launch. Add the cost of their rover and operations, and it's likely this entire project, of landing a rover on the moon, cost less than $0.1 billion.
The future of space belongs to whoever can get these costs down as much as possible. Because the goals are big - like industrializing the Moon. Water is enough to make rocket fuel, simple raw resources can be exploited to develop things in a near 0-g environment, and so on. At NASA level costs these sort of concepts would bankrupt the entire country. So it's going to be whichever entity/nation can operate most cost-effectively that will decide the future of space. And, for better or for worse, I know who I'd expect to win that game.
Plume-surface interaction is no joke. Even for these relatively small landers, the induced environment and surface degradation can cause significant damage to sensors and sensitive equipment on the lander.
That’s absolutely ridiculous, everyone knows the moon is just part of the giant crystalline structure that keeps the firmament from pouring through and flooding the earth again!
Anyone with slightest interest in space knew well in advance that the odds were stacked against achieving the full objective of that test, and any outcome that didn’t result in demolishing the launch tower would be a success:
“The most likely outcome is that something will go wrong during this flight... The primary goal of this mission, therefore, is to gather as much data as possible about the performance by Super Heavy and Starship in flight—for as long as that flight lasts.” [0]
Maybe they should be focusing on building something robust enough to land or even crash on the moon's surface and keep transmitting for a while, then work on the cool rover payload after that. It's perplexing to me not that it failed, but that they don't (so far) have any idea why or how.
Maybe you should read the comment more closely. I'm not saying they should have all the answers to hand immediately. I'm saying I'm surprised they don't prioritize hardened communications that can survive a crash or an explosion, much like the black boxes on aircraft. I suspect that when they were first proposed people hooted at the idea as well and said things like 'flight is hard.'
There were 2 other commercial landing that blacked out just before landing must be something they all didn’t take care of or maybe nasa is holding out some secret info
Maybe it's very hard to get everything working together? A lot of spacecrafts have failed on various missions, not just moon, since the beginning of space exploration.
This is not 1960s unlimited race budgets, this makes things harder.
this is a neat book on the history of unmanned spaceflight.
Take a look and see how long it took to get a probe into orbit. Into someone else's orbit. All that before they even tried landing anywhere
For moon landings, sourced from wikipedia[0] but you can certainly find the information in the aformentioned book:
> Luna 15, Luna 18, and Luna 23 all crashed [into the moon] on landing; and the U.S. Surveyor 4 lost all radio contact only moments before its landing.
Finally, here's a list of rocket launch failures in 2022
So, moon landings where the craft suddenly and unexpectedly lost comms in the seconds or minutes immediately prior to contact with the surface:
Government: 1 of 25 (4%)
Commercial: 3 of 3 (100%)
I'm saying it's odd, weird, and deserves investigating specifically from the angle of why commercial has this happen, but not government.
I'm saying this because it is odd.
I've not once mentioned conspiracy - though others seem ready to jump to that, probably as a subtle ad hominem instead of engaging with the discussion. Thank you for engaging, it's an interesting topic.
But is it odd? It is just a very hard problem. You need to spend a lot of resources to get it right and you need to spend them in the right way. Also you need to build up to the capability step by step. You can't drum random engineers together and expect them to build a lunar lander. You need to give them progressively harder and harder challenges, and see if they develop the right chops to handle them.
What do you want to investigate? I'm sure the commercial entities did their own investigations about their failures and the factors behind it. They are under no obligation to share anything with me or you.
It is indeed odd to me, that the only and all three missions distinct by funding all failed in exactly the same way, at exactly the same point, where those funded from a different source only did 1 in 25 times in that way.
Perhaps the randomly-drummed up engineers argument could have some merit for overall mission failure, though it doesn't adequately explain failure on only the same, final mode.
Were the same engineers involved? If so, it seems beyond the pale they didn't learn anything?
To be clear, it's not that these landers hit the moon and expired, they all stopped transmitting on the final leg. It's a weird failure and even weirder that it wasn't experienced more frequently in govt funded missions.
I've no plausible theory why, that's why it's interesting.
All reasonable explanations have to be a bit out there, other than the de facto "bad luck", which doesn't wash with me.
I'm not interested in investigating (beyond doing sums on wikipedia numbers). But I am interested in it being investigated by someone more qualified.
> I've no plausible theory why, that's why it's interesting.
These are groups on a shoestring budget trying to do something very hard for the first time. They fail at the hardest part of the task. How about that as an explanation?
> All reasonable explanations have to be a bit out there,
Have you tried hard things before? Failure is the default outcome.
> they all stopped transmitting on the final leg
That tends to happen when you hit a rock the size of the Moon. As these did.
I think you are making a mystery out of this where there is none.
They didn't lose contact on impact, but minutes prior. The hardest part is the landing, not necessarily specifically the communicating with the lander on the way down - which in some sense is trivial depending how it's done.
Indeed, it's an assumption they didn't land and instead impacted, until confirmed visually - as the landing is typically an automated process at that point.
Continually breezing past the points I've made does nothing to convince me this isn't odd or interesting. I've no horse in the race and will continue to be intrigued until someone can give better explanations, rather than "it's hard dude".
> Continually breezing past the points I've made does nothing to convince me this isn't odd or interesting.
I’m sorry that it feels like that to you. I’m doing my best to adress your points to the best of my abilities. If you feel I am breezing by your point that just means I haven’t understood you yet.
> They didn't lose contact on impact, but minutes prior.
I see what you are saying, but that is not true.
The Hakuto-R Mission 1 reports they have telemetry about the craft free falling. They talk about an altitude measurement system possibly miscalculating. They also talk about the thruster running out of fuel. [1]
The Beresheet had an Innertial Measurement Unit fail, then they had communication issues, and they regained communication, but by that time it was too late to save the lander. They also had telemetry up until the impact if I read it right. [2]
Great - this is some decent information. Thank you!
So, I've formed my opinions on both of these based on initial reports which all said similar things - contact was lost with the lander during the descent.
If that's reliably revised now I'd have to reconsider. Though it still strikes me as odd all initial reports were identical across the board. Why is that?
The third one is of course the subject of this article though we have come some way, so it's well understandable were it to become lost in the background.
Anyway, I appreciate your good natured engagement.
> Though it still strikes me as odd all initial reports were identical across the board. Why is that?
If you are asking why the initial report was about loss of signal then it is simple:
Crashing a lander leads to signal loss. The media wants to report on the situation and demands an imediate answer. “We lost the signal.” is a simple statement of fact the engineers can make without any further analysis. So they make that statement and the media reports it.
You were earlier saying that the initial reports all said the signal was lost minutes earlier than the landing? I don’t recall seeing anything about the timing.
> The third one is of course the subject of this article
No. The subject of the article is the first one in my list, the Hakuto-R Mission 1. Then there is the second on my list the Beresheet. And then it sounded like you were refering to a third comercial lander?
> Anyway, I appreciate your good natured engagement.
Thank you. I try my best. And thank you for yours too.
I can't find it, but at the time Antrix Corporation (India's commercial space contractor) was reported as responsible for it. This appears to be incorrect. Which throws the base premise here somewhat out the window.
Thanks for prompting me to look into it again. The corrected stats for failed lunar landers would be:
Only a certain number of launches will be successful. Only a certain number of landings will be successful. Sometimes you just hit a Poisson distribution.
If Kerbal Space Program has taught me anything, it’s that getting to the moon isn’t that difficult with enough rocket fuel. Stopping at the moon without blowing up and leaving a small crater, now that’s difficult.
I just finished the book 1 which ends with well known Apollo 13 disaster and the RCA of the explosion is that the liquid O2 tank for the fuel cell was intended for Apollo 10, but was removed for modifications, and during that was dropped about 5cm, a "minor jolt, but enough to damage the tube assembly used to fill and empty the tank". As part of testing - and under full, and capable supervision of NASA astronauts and mission control - the tank was filled and tested, and would refuse to drain fully due to the tube assembly being in the way. Alternative procedure to empty it was to heat it with the internal heater and have the liquid O2 simply evaporate. BUT! The heater inside was originally spec'ed to use 28V, but was upgraded to 65V, and everything in it was redesigned to do so, EXCEPT the thermostat inside the tank itself. The thermostat was supposed to provide temperature control and shut the heating process off if temperatures exceed things. Well, during that ground draining operation the 65V fried the thermostat, and the temp gauge on the ground only went up to 85 degrees. The insides of the tank went up to a 1000, which cracked the insulation on the wires of the motor designed to stir the tank, and those arced while in transit to moon and boom, made that mission what it was.
So yeah, space is hard. I am sure the mission people for the lander will do their design review and I look forward to their findings.