Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I might be wrong, but from my research it seem like they did this with $118 million paid by NASA. India did it with around $74 million, for reference.
Second the payload is much bigger.
I don’t think cost comparisons in this case is accurate considering something bigger was delivered faster.
> Nasa contributed $118m to get it off the ground, with Intuitive Machines funding a further $130m
OK, but there are a lot of these.
So it looks like the original claim was India did it for US$74.00. ;)
> After troubleshooting communications, flight controllers have confirmed Odysseus is upright and starting to send data. Right now, we are working to downlink the first images from the lunar surface.
Based on the little info in there I'm guessing the LIDAR hardware is their already planned backup system so when the primary sensors didn't function as planned they switched over. In this scenario I'd expect the controllers to want to hold off so they can configure the LIDAR and run its self test procedures as well as configure GNCP and ground control.
I would bet money they are using c++.
Now to get people back there... maybe someday.
Another part is safety: Apollo was extremely dangerous. There were a lot of single points of failure, three astronauts died on the ground, three more were very very narrowly saved over the course of only about ten missions. One of the reasons the program was cut short was the political worry after Apollo 13 of having astronauts die on the moon or something similar. This level of danger was considered acceptable given the mission back then, but I don't think it would be today. Who's right is a worthwhile question.
Another part was that Apollo had superb, hard working, young, smart, energetic people working on it. The nature and ambition of the project just attracted top people. The context of the Vietnam war also meant that there were a lot of engineers that would otherwise be working on weapons but maybe would rather not, and Apollo was a very nice peaceful project to apply all of that technology to.
I think you see a lot of the success of Tesla and SpaceX in the same observations. Both of those companies were super ambitious, and had a goal a lot of people wanted to get behind. Their competition was unattractive to work for, and seemed unlikely to achieve the goal of getting to mars/electric cars. The result was that they were able to hire some of the very smartest, hardest working people in the country. If you get a bunch of people like that together under a common banner, amazing things happen.
The other side to this is we don't build rockets today like we did in the sixties. Yes, some technical know-how here and there was technically "lost"--I've been in North Hollywood scrounging around for old NASA parts so that measurements could be taken and worked backwards from.
But even if we had that know-how, we wouldn't do it the same again. From novel materials to simulations to communications and onboard computing, modern spacecraft deserved to be redesigned. (For the counterfactuals, see ULA and Arianespace.)
So until someone (SpaceX) started eating that node-transition cost, we entered a period of apparent stasis. But that vacuum was energetic, and it wasn't about rediscovering lost knowledge, but inventing new kit.
For almost everything, doing something a lot of times over a short period of time is way cheaper than doing something a small number of times, especially if there's a long time between them, and the employees have quit/retired and the tooling/machinery/suppliers have been disposed of, gone out of business, or moved onto other things.
Some interesting junk and scrap shops in the area. Spent a few weekend afternoons puttering around looking at random stuff.
Oh, I don't know. I think we've actually made improvements in leaps and bounds over the "lost" tech. Our soundstage, green screen, and post tech has definitely improved /s
I know it's not what you meant, but the NoHo reference made me laugh at the thought
I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s a scrapyard with all kinds of space stuff (large and small) that I’m halfway sure isn’t ITAR controlled solely because the guy got it before 1976.
It's impressive to compare five percent and some small fraction, but the total budget also expanded a lot since then. While in constant dollars the current NASA budget is indeed smaller than it was then, it is only about half.
At the end of the day, the kinds of things they spend that budget on make sense to me for a research organization, and it makes sense to me that retracing the moonshot steps happen in the private sector.
5% today would be more than $1tn - a government-funded industry bigger than the entire military budget, comparable to the biggest tech companies.
It made sense in the 60s because the spinoffs from the green field R&D, especially in electronics and computing, are still paying a dividend.
Today? It's hard to see a moon base paying for itself any time soon. There's plenty of science to be done on the Moon, but direct dividends for industrial development are less clear.
The original number "5%" refered to NASA spending as a proportion of the federal budget.
These baselines currently differ by approximately a factor of 4.
Were those dividends clear in the 60s? Or are they only clear now that we look back on the venture 50 years later?
The exploration directorate, on the other hand, with their billion dollar rocket to nowhere…
See the 'Safire Memo', "In Event of Moon Disaster":
* (PDF) https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:In_the_event_of_moon_disa...
So long as; the participants are willing, the death rate is in the single percents per mission,the mission value add on terms of new capability is high, the risk is probably worth it. At least in my opinion.
The Challenger explosion was a moment that defined a generation. Some of that was that Christa McAuliffe was supposed to talk to millions of kids once she got into orbit, but some was just what people projected onto the astronauts generally.
When the three astronauts died in the Apollo 1 fire, no one shed a tear for the 30,000 man-years of effort that went into making the rocket that was destroyed. The effect was about the men themselves, who were considered national heroes, and also what it might have said about the United States that those men died.
Maybe we should treat this differently. Maybe in prior ages of exploration, we did. Back then we didn't have live TV or the internet though that could capture our emotion in the same way, and also in prior ages, not all expeditions were as closely connected with the nation itself.
Ideally we wouldn't have to pick and choose, but since I wasn't US Dictator during the 90s, the Hubble Space Telescope + a lot of probes throughout the solar system was probably more impactful for overall scientific discovery than the counterfactual where NASA invested in continued moon landings.
Give me one example.
> cost of all this would be absolutely astronomical, far more so than it was back then
Inflation adjusted, the Saturn V was a $45bn project [1]. That's a mulitiple of the total capital SpaceX has raised (or been granted).
[1] https://apollo11space.com/the-cost-of-launching-a-saturn-v/
That’s using a fraction of their budget.
Each flight could cost single-digit millions, mainly in fuel and employees.
It’s interesting how this has become such a problem again. Post WW2, the US dismantled massive, basically building size hydraulic presses in former Nazi Germany and shipped them back to the US because that was a capability we didn’t have.
This is true but irrelevant to space flight. We don’t fly big cast or forged parts.
Saturn V contained aluminium cast parts, but nothing we can’t make today [1]. (To my knowledge, no components were built in our WWII-era forges.) Modern carbon composites and aluminium alloys are superior, and we’re in the process of surpassing the Saturn V’s capabilities in SpaceX’s Starship.
[1] https://evergreene.com/pdf/evergreene_saturn-v-rocket.pdf
We’re entering a halcyon of American space flight, with multiple teams doing what others cannot and Apollo-era engineers could only dream of. It’s mind-boggling to see the disconnect between a lunar landing alongside a caricature of American industrial decline.
That’s an application, not a capability. It would be like arguing iPhones never surpassed ENIAC because mine hasn’t simulated a thermonuclear detonation.
> Read the book. There are a thousand more things like that there.
I asked you to name one. Explosive forming is something (a) we can still do but (b) that nobody does because we have better materials and processes.
The engineering of the Apollo era was remarkable. But the problem with promulgating this myth of lost capability is it stunts our ability to get things done today.
Smarter Every Day had a rather interesting video on his concerns with the program. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU and they were more about a program design that requires over 15 fueling launches for every trip to the moon, and concerns about management and transparency.
I don't think anyone is claiming this issues are lost technology though.
Stupidity and ignorance sometimes tread into troll territory.
Nobody has gone back to the Moon since America. That’s not because of a simultaneous global coma. It’s because nobody bothered. If your understanding of aeronautics and mechanics is so base as to propose that we, America, cannot lap what we did in the 60s today, there might be better reading material available than anecdotes [1].
If your complaint is literally a private v public one, that’s beyond me and my cat.
[1] https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Aerospace_Engineering...
While we might have deindustrialized a lot of commodity electronics and small consumer things, I'm pretty sure we're still totally fine when it comes to aerospace. What with our Air Force and NASA and SpaceX and all that. More than fine, even.
There are always going to be bits of technology and training that seem to no longer be needed for modern products. And sometimes, some new product will need to resurrect one or more of them.
The idea that there's an "active program" to train people on literally every previous engineering practice ever created isn't feasible.
The designs are not optimal for modern production approaches.
As an example, a modernized F-1 engine would have far simplified plumbing, much fewer parts, the injector, which contained hundreds of handcrafted and hand-tuned parts to minimize combustion instability would be replaced with one machine crafted part where the instabilities would be properly cancelled out through computer simulation. But, what's the point?
The F-1s were designed because computer control systems of the time were not good enough to control a large number of smaller, more efficient engines. Nowadays such control systems exist, with Falcon Heavy flying 27 engines, and Starship doing 33. The fuel they used is also not really being seen as the future, with medium and heavy lifters shifting towards Methane for its better efficiency, cleaner combustion aiding reuse and being liquid at similar temperatures to oxygen, simplifying the cryo-tank design.
They simply aren't relevant anymore outside of out of touch Congress critters looking for ways to pour more billions into the dead end of SLS.
The other big point is that Saturn V wouldn't even meet the expectations current lunar landers are expected to meet. Both lander proposals are huge, potentially with the habitable volume of the entire ISS. They could, on their own, serve as small long term lunar bases, if it weren't for Orion being unable to spend an extended time in space.
In comparison, these landers have to do everything autonomously, the computer has to figure out where it's safe to touch down, it has to be able to figure out if a sensor is malfunctioning and if so, which is the one that's wrong.
Similarly, previous uncrewed landers were not expected to be that smart, they just aimed for a patch of land believed to be flat and hoped for the best.
Ten years ago, maybe. Today, I'm not sure. It's been a long time since I had that "wow, everyone here is ten times smarter than me" feeling at one of the big tech firms.
And to the extent the system works, it's correcting. We're seeing layoffs on one side. And moon landings on another.
Capital allocation.
We also haven't returned to the moon yet because of cost, I would imagine.
Wow, I wasn't aware that the "only point at which the opinion surveys demonstrate that more than 50 percent of the public believed Apollo was worth its expense came in 1969 at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing" [1].
[1] https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/exploding-the-myth...
It will be very hard to make 3He extraction on the moon energy positive, since it occurs at very low concentration in the regolith.
For example people died while training to become astronauts, because the training was hard. This would be impossible today; the first time someone breaks so much as a leg the whole project would be suspended and several committees would need time to evaluate...
I don't think this is correct. Astronauts died due to equipment malfunction (Apollo 1) or from airplane crashes or car crashes. But those aren't the same as dying because the training was too intense.
As a kid it was like impossible for me to play. Now it is just ... challenging.
My voxel tribute: https://mooncraft2000.com
Developing custom probes where most of the development+weight is to navigate space and land, May quickly become obsolete.
I have no idea whats coming down the pipe and I used to
On a serious note I’m interested to hear what the measured boil off vs calculated was for their propellant load. Depending which direction it is could mean a huge difference to the Artemis plans.
But I also note that Odysseus cost NASA a little over $100M on a fixed price contract, per Ars Technica.
By way of comparison, the Indian government's Chandrayaan-3 mission, the lander of which touched down in 2023, cost roughly $90M.
So private space isn't automatically cheaper than 100% government agency-run missions: it just depends on the agency.
But they have perks like chauffeurs and household staff that wouldn't be available to the equivalent in the USA
Mars might - strong might - be able to become self sustaining. If that is the case I would expect to see wars eventually as it becomes settled.
There will of course be the usual crime. This might rise to the level of "cowboy shootouts" but still the police will come in quick and take care of it.
<3