NASA Peregrine 1: US lander will not make it to moon's surface due to fuel leak | Hacker News Reader

NASA Peregrine 1: US lander will not make it to moon's surface due to fuel leak

theguardian.com

85 pointspseudolus89 comments

It's important to remember that this was the first launch of ULA's new rocket, the first launch BO's new engine, and the first launch of anything for Astrobotic. This was a very experimental launch with a payload only slightly more serious than when SpaceX launched a car on Falcon Heavy's inaugural launch. They will all learn a lot and try again.

As far as I can tell, the Vulcan (rocket), and the engines, all performed flawlessly. The Astrobotic Peregrine has a uncontrollable propellant leak (not sure if it's best characterized as a leak or something else but the net result is the same) and will not be able to complete its primary mission (moon landing).

I was following various live coverage (just as an interested observer) and it sounded like there were orientation issues with the Peregrine lander after separation. It seems possible tgat it could have used so much fuel trying to get solar panels and antenna aligned right, or even just doing unintended maneuvering, that it now cannot complete the lunar orbit maneuver, but is still otherwise working nominally.

A stuck open valve would explain all this. Not saying that is what happened, just that it's a theory that also fits.

One of the maneuvering engines gets stuck on while trying orient the solar panel at mission start. Loss attitude authority until it runs out of propellant. Now that it's done, control is restored, so power positive on the panels, but the fuel situation is beyond recovery.

>this was the first launch of ULA's new rocket, the first launch BO's new engine, and the first launch of anything for Astrobotic.

It's also important to note that the first two of those went off without a hitch. The issues with the payload seem to be overshadowing ULA and BO's accomplishments, and I hope this result does not make companies shy away from interesting test payloads.

Does Astrobotic have the cash to try again? This is their first mission, and most of their money has been contracts from NASA, and such.

Has any space company done it right first time around? I'd hope that the business planning wasn't so poor to put all the eggs in one basket.

> this was the first launch of ULA's new rocket, the first launch BO's new engine, and the first launch of anything for Astrobotic.

Is this company headed by SW developers ? Is NASA quality department dead ? Too many "firsts" thrown together and expected to work.

NASA QA is hardly involved. This is a feature of the CLPS process. We're trying to get to a point where "basic" space services like moon landings are a commercial off the shelf product we can buy.

Maybe it's cheaper to blow up a few rockets and iterate, than paying the cost of trying to perfect it on the first try?

I reckon there were a lot more "firsts" involved in Apollo 11 or the JWT mission.

Which company? ULA? BO? Astrobotic?

Now now now no need for friendly fire! The correct protocol is software blames business who blames manufacturing who blames hw. This way nobody wants to bring the bad subject up :)

I'm sure they will learn a lot. Unfortunately as far as I'm aware they are going to "try again" in about a year with their Griffin lander carrying NASA's first unmanned moon rover. To the best of my knowledge there's no plan for another Peregrine launch before then.

Very often the first launch of an entirely new rocket is sent up with only a "mass simulator", so anything of scientific or R&D value that could go up instead of a boilerplate satellite is a bonus.

13 centuries passed between the construction of the Roman Pantheon and the Florence Cathedral. The technique to construct an unreinforced concrete dome was lost in Italy until the diligent research of Filippo Brunelleschi. We forget the engineering capabilities of our forebears to our own peril. To those who may say I am picking on this incident unfairly, that I am making a mountain of a molehill, I would only ask you to share whether you feel more comfortable riding a Boeing airplane built this year or built a decade ago.

"It's important to remember that this was the first launch of ULA's new rocket, the first launch BO's new engine, and the first launch of anything for Astrobotic. This was a very experimental launch with a payload only slightly more serious than when SpaceX launched a car on Falcon Heavy's inaugural launch. They will all learn a lot and try again."

- eagerpace

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38927338

Falsely attributed quote - the poster is eagerpace not edgarpace :)

Fake news everywhere!!! Thanks :)

I would argue that we havent forgotten how to do spacecraft or even landers. We have the documentation and plenty of engineers in the workforce that have had success in landings, its just that its really hard to do these things.

And on top of that we are doing this in a totally new way with the rise of the 'New Space' approach.

I take the bus and don't really need domes for anything.

Eh, NASA has been losing interplanetary landers for as long as its been launching them. The original Surveyor program, the pre-Apollo effort to land robotic probes on the moon, lost 2 out of 7.

I don't think there's any evidence here for decreasing ability to engineer space probes.

We can't figure out how the Egyptians (or Aztecs or Maya) built their pyramids. Stonehenge is an engineering mystery. The heads on Easter Island are likewise a riddle to moderns.

Indeed, it's well-documented that we have no idea how to reproduce a Saturn V booster at this point -- too much documentation, expertise, and manpower have been lost in the intervening years.

I'd reckon that there's more knowledge and skills that are lost, intergenerationally, than we gain through R&D.

We can't figure out how the Egyptians built the pyramids (although there are theories), but we definitely know how to build pyramids. It's fairly easy if anyone wants to pay for one.

We can't what now?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43V9RTpnxbk

Airplanes are not places where I ever expect to find comfort.

> The technique to construct an unreinforced concrete dome was lost in Italy until the diligent research of Filippo Brunelleschi

So... I was curious what technique that was, and according to Wikipedia, Florence Cathedral is a brick dome. I would not have expected anyone to use the phrase "unreinforced concrete dome" based on what I've seen on there, and indeed the word "concrete" doesn't appear there once in the article.

Kinda related: I get that there will always be some amount of mission-related junk, but a for-profit company charging people to dump their DNA, cremated ashes and other random souvenirs on the moon always rubbed me the wrong way. If you can't do this in a national park you shouldn't be allowed to do it on the damn moon.

> If you can't do this in a national park you shouldn't be allowed to do it on the damn moon.

https://www.joincake.com/blog/scattering-ashes-in-national-p...

Regulations for stuff like this seem frivolous and overly restrictive, until you remember that what seems completely benign when one person does it is potentially destructive to the future of humanity when done at scale (like burning oil, throwing away plastic, etc.).

A national park is a vibrant ecosystem that can be accessed by potentially millions of people, all of whom might have some thing they want to leave behind. The Moon is a lifeless, airless rock which is only accessible to a tiny number of people and only in a limited sense.

The concerns for preservation are just so different between the two. As far as we know national parks are unique in the Solar system, maybe beyond. As far as we know lifeless, airless rocks are downright common, the only real thing going for the moon is that it's relatively close by.

The DNA and cremated ashes are not being put on the moon, they are going to be put in orbit around the sun. Its a separate mission but they both hitched a ride on the same rocket.

No the plan is specifically to leave them on the surface of the moon. See https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/05/world/peregrine-moon-mission-....

Multiple private companies today are offering such "moon burials".

Out of curiosity, why? I have a very different perspective and am having a hard time seeing where you're coming from. From my perspective, the Moon's just a huge dead rock that makes Mars looks like a tropical paradise. 2-week long days with boiling temperatures, followed by 2-week long nights with temperatures near zero. All while getting pounded endlessly by meteorites with no real shielding. Placing ashes or souvenirs on it seem completely innocuous to me.

I also just did the math, and if each human on Earth used up a square foot on the Moon with this sort of stuff, there'd be enough space for more than 400 trillion people, which is a long winded way of saying that the amount of space used up is effectively 0. So I'm just not really seeing the downside?

Sure the moon is barren and useless but then so is Antarctica or large chunks of the ocean floor or really most of the earth's surface. That isn't a green light to ignore the consequences and let people treat it as their backyard.

The moon is also, unlike Mars and other similar bodies, immediately accessible to us (by many, many orders of magnitude of distance and effort).

And "it's just one ship/urn/container" is never really a good argument because it is always going to scale up exponentially. So we need to treat it less like a trash dump and more a valuable scientific (and maybe eventually tourist) preserve.

> Sure the moon is barren and useless but then so is Antarctica or large chunks of the ocean floor or really most of the earth's surface. That isn't a green light to ignore the consequences and let people treat it as their backyard.

This is the part we probably disagree on the most. Wherever we look on Earth, in ice, in deserts, under the crushing depths of water in trenches, even in fumeroles and volcanic ecosystems... we find life or evidence of life. All of Earth that we can access is teeming with life, the history of life, our history. It's also a dynamic system on long time-scales, a glacier today is the water in our lakes and oceans "tomorrow" so to speak.

We don't know what we might contaminate or disturb with our whims, on Earth, but on the Moon we know it is literally lifeless. Not devoid of life most people care about, or are aware of, which is an important distinction compared to lifelessness.

Does that mean the bitcoin is lost in space? Seems like an apt ending for such a useless PR move

The article doesn't mention Bitcoin, but I was able to find another reference to that here:

> More controversially, the lander contains non-scientific payloads, including a physical coin “loaded with one bitcoin” and a Japanese “lunar dream capsule” that contains 185,872 messages from children from around the world.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/jan/08/nasa-peregri...

Happy to hear that more Bitcoin is lost.

This is good for Bitcoin.

Few understand.

you mean like the klf buring a million pound was good for the gbp?

I can't tell if you are joking. The market cap of Bitcoin remained the same, one less coin to share it with.

The actual coin is in the blockchain. It's lost only if they wrote the private key on the physical coin sent to space (I didn't check if they did that) and deleted the key from every backup on Earth. It's going to take a lot of Bitcoin hype before it beats the cost of a recovery mission from that orbit.

Related discussion:

Peregrine lander suffers anomaly after launch

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913857

So the Navajo Nation has won after all.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/05/world/peregrine-moon-mission-...

I guess the Navajo were able to get their gods to scuttle the mission. Impressive!

https://www.space.com/nasa-responds-navajo-nation-objection-...

> Peregrine 1, which is also the first commercial space probe to attempt a soft landing on the moon

Afaik, that honor belongs to SpaceIL and their Beresheet spacecraft.

As someone who built, tested, launched, and crashed another commercial lunar lander in the last two years the media around this lander has been quite frustrating.

Sorry to see the lander fail though, I know what they are feeling now and it sucks.

From Japan?

Yeah I was on the ispace M1 integration team.

Is it accurate to say this is NASA's lander, or is this headline-bait? By my understanding, it's Astrobotic's lander, with a handful of payloads on it, some of which are NASA's.

I'm sure this headline A/B tests better for the same reason anything referencing "Elon Musk's SpaceX" does better than "SpaceX", but that's orthogonal to its accuracy.

It's definitely AB's lander. That's the whole purpose of the CLPS contract that NASA used to pay for it. I'm on another NASA team that is "customer" of AB's for their Griffin lander. The degree to which AB's product is a black box to us is quite frustrating.

Well as they say: Shoot for the moon and you'll land among the stars.

In this case it's more like shoot for the moon and you run out of fuel...

The lander also contains non-scientific payloads, including DNA from former US presidents, including George Washington, John F Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower, which could now remain in space. The ashes of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, as well as those of former stars of the TV series, are also onboard.

Did we not always try as much as possible not to contaminate things in space? And this seems especially pointless, who needs presidential DNA and TV star ash on the moon?

The DNA and ashes are not going to the moon - they are going into orbit around the sun. Two missions, same rocket.

How many times have Gene Roddenberry's ashes been to space now?

so bitcoin doesnt go to the moon?

Commiserations.

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