The 2024 privately funded moon lander is doing worse than some 1970s lunar landers by America and the failed state of the USSR. God damn.
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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And it's doing it for around 0,05% of the price. (~$250 billion adjusted for inflation for Apollo 1 vs ~$120 million for IM-1)
TBF that’s a cheat. They didn’t have to be the ones investigating, researching, and developing everything to make it all work for the first time.
The science today is very well established. While it doesn’t lessen the difficulty, nobody is reinventing the wheel at full price. They’re standing on the shoulders of very well established giants.
Actually they reinvented the wheel a little bit by being the first spacecraft that used cryogenic propellant for a multi day mission/moon landing. When you look into it, what they've achieved is still very impressive, even if NASA did much of the heavy lifting.
Capitalism is all about efficiency. An efficient total loss is somehow a win!
That might be the case right? Let's say there a percentage chance that would have succeeded call it 10%
Now your first attempt fails, maybe because of some miscalculation or lack of engineering precision
Even if the older way more expensive version had a 100% success rate you'd probably still rather the cheaper version right?
Also not sure how this is about capitalism, replace the above for material cost and it's the same thing
And money is the only cost that matters, right? Let's not be concerned about the material waste involved in the launch or the pollution that's building up in outer space with each failure.
This kind of business oriented mindset is why Boeing planes are falling out of the sky and dropping their bolts.
Also the cost being cited for those early space programs involved an immense amount of breakthrough R&D which the newer programs ought to be benefiting from; there's no reason to believe that a government program doing the same work as these private companies today would cost as much as they did in the early days. It's not even a meaningful quantitative comparison in the first place.
So material waste can be directly tied to cost. If you're trying to bring down cost then you're going to try to reduce waste correct? That's why there is so much work being done for reusable launch vehicles
For space debris and pollution I don't think we can squarely blame capitalism. Under a purely communist economy there's no guarentee that anyone would care any more about it than currently And you can attack that issue by a combination of penalising companies that create debris and rewarding those that remove it under a capitalist economy
As for it not being entirely comparable. Sure the government spent a lot of money on that early R&D. But do we think that if we banned companies from doing this kind of work that govt agencies like NASA would be necessarily more cost effective, cause less pollution, and less debris?
The overwhelming cost in these projects is always engineering salaries. These companies are making the calculation that they can throw shit (rockets) at the wall (into space) carelessly to save money by wasting more material to avoid paying the salaries of people that could think through the design more carefully and come up with something that will have a reasonable probability of working the first time.
And you can attack that issue by a combination of penalising companies that create debris and rewarding those that remove it under a capitalist economy
Add this to the insurmountable pile of things we should theoretically regulate but never will because of regulatory capture.
Do you have any data to back that up? It would be quite interesting
I don't think regulation is impossible to achieve, look at the EU. And what I am fairly sure of is you have better odds of passing regulation than replacing capitalism entirely
Tbh I assume that with a reduced budget the man hours and capital used is also reduced.
Yes, this is embarrassing, and proves private enterprise isn't always better as is often claimed.
Mars lander Viking 1 was successful in 1976, a missions that was way harder to accomplish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1
Yes going to the moon is very easy.
Can't believe they failed that task.
I don't see how the failed state of the USSR is noteworthy when talking about historic space missions. The USSR might have collapsed but they had a lot of space successes. First human in space, for instance.
More or less that the idea of how the country that got Humans into space first eventually collapsed, but "modern capitalism solves all problems" can't do the same tasks as well was 1950's USSR, and that's coming from someone who doesn't like the USSR in general.
Crash Landed on its head (I always though the design looked built to spill anyway), sent no images, I don't believe we gained any scientific data (please correct me if I missed something on that front though), and froze to death in a week. This would all be a nice try and some learning progress if it was 1971 perhaps, but this goes in the failure book for sure. Not to say that failure = useless / bad. But let's save the champagne success story for a company that gets it right.
It's very good and learning progress for the 20s too. In the last 5 years for lunar lander missions we've had 6 outright failures, 2 successes, and this is the second "mixed success"
When nobody in your country does something for decades and then a different group of people try doing it in different ways, they're largely starting from scratch.
sent no images
If you check the comments on Ars Technica, someone reposted an image that's supposed to have come from the lander (it's an uncorrected shot through a fisheye lens, though). Given that the link with Odysseus is apparently barely faster than an acoustic-coupler modem, I'm not expecting much more.
Failure. Just as the Japanese one that was labeled a failure by the western news just weeks before that did the exact same thing. Articles were even published saying after japan's failure, the US could be the first to land successfully on the moon in so many decades. And it didn't so its a failure.
Japan’s lander met all of their own internal criteria for being considered a success. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s at least partially true for this lander as well. This thing was absurdly inexpensive relative to previous projects, IIRC.
I would agree that the Japanese lander was a success. But I refuse to enable western hypocrisy that labels the exact same actions by two different stages in opposing viewpoints just for propaganda.
Sure. Calling the Japanese lander a failure and this one a success would be hypocrisy. I think both should be called successes, to some degree of the word success.
If I were handing out letter grades for space probes and landers, they'd get a C on this one (maybe C+ if they somehow manage to get significant payload data back over the very low-bandwidth link they've been able to establish). Why? Well, first of all, they actually made it to the moon rather than stalling out in orbit or wandering off in the wrong direction. Secondly, the probe soft-landed, rather than plowing a new crater and spreading parts all over a kilometer radius, and it was in good enough shape to phone home. They got two out of three of the most important things right. Now they just have to work on keeping it upright on the way down.
It was even a minor trip that tipped it over. It got everything substantially right except for that. Great success.
The failure of the launch crew to remove a protective cover before launch led to the mess up.
a success or a failure?
What a heretic question!!
Nowadays everything is a success if at least the very first countdown has begun. You need to explode way before if you want to be called a failure.
Why couldn’t someone nip up with a jumper and a wee thermos of tea?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As the Sun dips closer to the horizon, and with the two-week-long lunar night coming, the spacecraft will, effectively, freeze to death.
On Friday, during a news conference, Intuitive Machines' chief executive, Steve Altemus, said the company believed Odysseus had come down to the lunar surface in a vertical configuration, as anticipated.
Altemus said on Friday that the company was attempting to orient a solar array at the top of the vehicle to gather sunlight in addition to the panels on its side.
During the news conference on Friday, Altemus and the company's chief technology officer, Tim Crain, said they expected to be able to conduct most of the science missions on board the lander despite its sideways configuration.
There remains some hope, however, that a CubeSat camera developed by students at Embry Riddle, EagleCam, will be deployed and activated before Odysseus' power runs out.
No privately developed spacecraft has ever made a soft landing on the Moon before, and it is important that Intuitive Machines has been able to maintain contact with the lander for several days.
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Failure. Both that and the Japanese probe made it to the moon. Odysseus was able to phone home briefly before its mission failed. The Japanese probe had Rovers successfully detach and return a picture of the failed landing
This was not a success. With that said it doesn't mean there weren't good things, from what I read they did a whole lot of things well. People seem to be unable to understand they can coexist.
And yet NASA thinks Artemis is a good idea...
I'd honestly be content with keeping the ISS up or expanding it with some new modules.