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Comment by sadhorse | Hacker News Reader

Humans did it manually in the 60's. How hard can it be to do it with computers and radar? I don't want to sound like that guy but... how hard can it be?

Edit: My point being: spacex is already doing it on earth, dealing with stronger gravity and air non linearity.

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The IM-1 Lander was supposed to land using a LIDAR altimeter, but they forgot to remove the safety before launch. They tried to make a last minute software change to use an experimental navigation system from NASA to get altimetry, but this didn't work. So the lander landed using visual navigation and IMU data only for the last 15km to the surface.

It probably would have landed upright if the LIDAR worked. It is impressive that it landed as intact as it did

[0] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/02/it-turns-out-that-odys...

Humans have been driving cars since decades, how hard would it be to make a self-driving, well it seems it is difficult.

Because streets are not controlled environments. Planes have auto pilots for a long time, because air is a highly controlled environment with professionals agreeing to cooperate and making logical decisions (most of times).

This would be a cool simulation / programming game.

I highly recommend taking a look at Kerbal Space Program plus k/OS. I've done a few Kerbal hackathons with friends where we all get the same spacecraft, in the same scenario, and have to write k/OS scripts to perform some mission. Difficult, but fun and often hilarious!

I mean, it's not like it's rocket science!

More seriously, the humans in question were very skilled pilots with huge amounts of general flight experience and specific lunar training; they also had access to hardware that had already been expensively tested in the lunar environment. Neither of those were available to this project.

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