Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon | Hacker News Reader

Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

theguardian.com

263 pointspseudolus340 comments

These 2 failures could have been easily avoidable both times.

I really wish there was a push in the US government to create and stockpile plutonium-238 and ensure it's readily available, subsidized, and offered for all US probes/rovers/other scientific instruments in space (whether it be for NASA's use who currently has to ration because of how little they have left, or for private use after approval).

Like, why aren't all of space scientific instruments RTG powered like voyager 1 which is still providing useful scientific data 47+ years later. Think about all of the lost scientific insights over the past few decades because either NASA (because of a low stockpile) or private companies like intuitive (from their 2 failures) end up choosing solar panels for their source of power with no other alternative.

Besides the fact that solar panels can fail if they aren't pointed a certain way, they usually offer far less power, and are subject to radiation, micro meteor, or dust damage. All of these are the main reason why these instruments tend to have a far shorter lifespan than voyager 1.

Generally I agree, but Moon is not a bad place for solar panels if a spacecraft has no contingencies and is able to harvest energy during Moon's day and store it in batteries to be used over the night. The sufficient power can be generated by a solar panel of the size (or even smaller) of the spacecraft itself. The other story is for missions like Juno [1] or Europa Clipper [2] which use solar panels near Jupiter - instead of centering develoment and mass budget around payload most of the spacecraft is an enourmously sized solar array. Juno panels generate 14kW on Earth orbit and only 500W near Jupiter [1].

1. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-juno-spacecraft-breaks-s...

2. https://www.nasa.gov/missions/europa-clipper/nasas-europa-cl...

Another non-obvious problem is that RTGs, as any other thermal machines, need a gradient of temperature to work, i.e. to generate electrical power there should be hot (nuclear material) and cold (radiators) side. On interplanetary spacecraft (Voyager, New horizons) Sun is in a predictable (and stable) direction so RTG's radiators can be put in a permanent shadow of the spacecraft. On the Moon the sun is moving, and there is no atmosphere (unlike on Mars where RTGs are used), so on a small spacecraft RTG will need to be dug deep into the regolith which is absoluteky non-trivial since just landing straight sometimes is a problem.

There are always tradeoffs, it is almost never "why don't they just" case in spacecraft development.

It was my understanding that RTGs are relatively dense compared to their energy output. They made sense for Voyager because incident light from the sun falls off as the square of the distance and they were designed to be the farthest-away man-made objects ever.

But if you "just" want to put a probe on the moon, solar panels weigh less than plutonium.

As with everything in aerospace, the reason is a trade-off you are unaware of. In order to launch an RTG you need to abide to extensive compliance requirements that ensure no ball of plutonium lands in someone's head. Ergo weight. In space, weight is everything.

You are one internet search away from finding the specific power of RTGs and of solar panels on the moon.

An alternative to Pu-238 is Am-241 https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Can-americium-re... .

The UK has around 140t of trans-uranics in its civilian stockpile, of which an estimated 5.6 tonnes of this is Am-241 per https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/627b4440-37c9-4e....

Historically, PU-238 was a byproduct of (fissile) Pu-238 production for nuclear weapons. That need kinda went away with arms reduction treaties beginning in the mid-to-late Cold War. IIRC the US nuclear weapons stockpile is about 10% of what it was at its peak. AFAIK there is no current Pu-239 production in the US.

The need for Pu-238 was recognized years ago as the stockpile of consumed by various space probes and I believe Oak Ridge now products Pu-238 fuel pellets. I'm not sure if this production could be ramped up.

But Plutonium use has various risks associated with it. Aside from the obvious security risks, you're strapped it to a rocket that may explode while launch and come back to Earth. This is effectively a dirty bomb if the RTG containment is breached.

Solar panels are really the right choice for anything out to at least mars. Here we had a probe fall over. Would that be recoverable with RTG? Maybe. Maybe not.

Reading the title and then your first sentence is the most HN experience.

All they had to do was just...

Seriously I started reading that comment expecting to find out the lander only had two legs or something.

Spin up a quick national plutonium reserve, takes like 3 minutes, such incompetence

I smell an opportunity for a new player in the NPRaaS space!

Clearly HN is smarter than an entire team of Aero/Mechanical/Electrical engineers who have not thought of the obvious solution.

The Aero/Mechanical/Electrical engineers all know this. They just aren't allowed to do it.

One reason all space scientific instruments are not powered by RTGs is that prior to each launch NASA has to run a very involved and time-consuming risk analysis program to determine just how much of the state of Florida becomes uninhabitable for the next 10,000 years if the rocket blows up on the launch pad.

I used to conduct said risk analysis.

That is really interesting. How much of Florida would be contaminated?

I had a Look Magazine cover from the early 1950s .. It showed oil barrels full of radioactive waste, with a guy moving one on a handcart, with heavy gloves on! The point of the photo was "radioactive material must be handled very carefully" .. the guy had thick gloves .. for a fifty gallon drum of radioactive waste, among many of them.. Things change

That's great but I'm reasonably confident that if the probe ends up sideways, at least half of the science instruments won't work anyway. And no guarantee on communications either.

Good advice:

1. Never invade Russia in winter.

2. Make sure your robotic lunar lander has a low center of gravity.

> Never invade Russia in winter.

I thought it was never get involved in a land war in Asia.

Especially never invade the part of Russia that's in Asia, in winter.

The thing about the more generalized form is that on most of the cases people remember, the invasion started on spring or summer.

Indeed, and there are two fields where "when will the project be finished" is recognized as a logical fallacy: Software development, and warfare.

There are been lot of land wars in Asia over history. Sometimes it goes well for the defender, sometimes the attacker.

Never get involved in a war is good advice, but sometimes impossible to keep.

Unless you're Asian, then you'll win.

Tell that to the Japanese.

What are you referring to? They had a failed invasion of Korea; they had a very successful invasion of China that ended when they were defeated in a naval war well outside of Asia.

The invasion of China wasn't successful. It was a quagmire. Japan didn't have the men or resources to conquer China and Chiang could just retreat whenever he had to.

> Japan didn't have the men or resources to conquer China

Historically that doesn't take much. Having almost no men or resources didn't stop Nurhaci.

What was going wrong with the occupation?

I recommend reading Eri Hotta's Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy

It's a book about how Japan decided to go to war with the united states. It details how China was a quagmire for Japan that was sucking up all the empire's resources. They could conquer land but they couldn't hold it. They could achieve tactical victories against Chiang but could not erode his ability to stay in the field and fight.

The story of how the leaders in Tokyo decided to double down on a war they were slowly losing in China, by starting a war they would more quickly and apocalypticly lose against the United States is a fascinating one.

Never go in against a Sicilian when death (of a spacecraft) is on the line

Only slightly less well known.

I spent the last few years building up an immunity to lunar dust powder

"And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison. I am deathly ill."

when gravity is 1/6, a lower centre of gravity might not do as much as you think

Surely it just needs to be 6 times lower? ;)

I think that is entirely irrelevant. It just changes the speed of the topple. Does not affect at all the tendency to tip over?

It's been a while, but IIRC when we assume all other variables as constant, a lower center of mass (a) will decrease the denominator and thus increase the resulting necessary tipping force.

Fₜ = (m × g × cos(θ) × b) / (a + b)

Adding to the sibling @mathgeek's comment, that's only true when there are no outside forces other than gravity. You can see that by taking the counter-argument to its extreme: with gravity of epsilon, even a gentle prod at the top of the object will topple it over.

Physics 1A: the center of mass does not change. It is irrelevent. The tendancy to tip over is how wide the base is: look at the LEM. Big wide base. Did not tip over. None of them tipped over. They tip over faster on earth due to larger Earth's gravity and mass.

A big wide base with a center of mass magically very high off the ground would still be tippy though.

When it's "very high off", the base stops being "big wide".

That is exactly a description of why center of mass is the important variable. If the center of mass wanders outside the support point, it tips over. That's the whole deal right there!

That just makes it six times as important!

Why didn't they use that bouncy inflatable ball technique the cute JPL robot used?

Magnitude of gravity changes nothing as long as it’s not 0. Your CG is either inside the area covered by the hull of your leg contact points or it’s not. It won’t be stable in other regimes just because gravity is lower.

I think it does change the situation when you're potentially dealing with lateral movement. In 1/6th of a g it takes less lateral velocity to topple over.

Rotational inertia does not change. Any horizontal V and a landing leg that sticks in the silt is recipe for disaster.

> Make sure your robotic lunar lander has a low center of gravity.

Hmm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS

Don't worry, there will be people inside!

Oh, wait, hrm...

Well that’s a big improvement because the humans can climb out and push the rocket upright again!

Hey, no mocking Jeb and Bill. They brought many a scientific advancement to humanity.

I’m a be honest: Jeb and Bill have done great work for us, but when it comes to getting a tipped over rocket upright… they haven’t always come through for me.

Humans - and the mostly empty space they require - up top.

Fuel, engines, and water will be at the bottom.

(For practical examples, look at the F9 first stage, or the Starship prototypes they've already tested.)

Fuel will be a huge percentage of the weight, and won't that be mostly exhausted after taking off and then doing a powered descent? The center of gravity will move quite a bit upwards.

Yes and no. For any vehicle that is carrying humans you'll want sufficient fuel to compensate for error or unexpected complications. And depending on the situation for a lunar landing that may require sufficient fuel to abort a landing well into an attempt so that a second landing (or return) can be attempted (instead of committing and hoping the crew just doesn't die). This doubly so if there's a capacity to refuel in orbit for a second attempt.

Also you'll need to assume for at least the foreseeable future that any Starship HLS landing will require sufficient fuel to return to orbit.

With enough margin left you can very reasonably adjust the center of balance by using multiple tanks and pumping all the fuel into rear tanks.

That should be enough given that the Starship HLS is estimated to have around 1.5 million kg of fuel at max capacity and only 100k kg of payload to the lunar surface (200k kg payload max for non-landing starship). That makes the payload mass to lunar surface only 6-7% of the total fuel capacity.

So outside of an extremely risky "attempt landing with no fuel left for an abort or return to orbit", you'll have at least double to quadruple the weight of the payload in just fuel alone.

Now for an earth landing of course the calculus here is different, especially since Starship's earth landing strategy explicitly requires throwing the vessel on it's side during the "bellyflop" and only pulling out of that fall with a powered landing at the last possible second.

TLDR No. Where center of mass will be able to make a difference fuel will make up significantly more mass than the payload.

Trump could have followed Zelenskyy's example and not let Russia invade his country in winter

For (1): except, of course, if you’re the Mongol army. They preferred attacking in the winter (swamps and rivers are frozen so easily passable). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Kievan_Ru...

Yes, this is why they did a similar thing with Ukraine (Feb/everything is frozen - for those who haven't been in frozen countries in the Winter, the earth/ground/dirt (pick your word) becomes hard like cement)).

To paraphrase one of my favorite historians - Every sweeping historical generalization has a "probably doesn't apply to the Monguls" exception. If you don't expect your professor to waste chalk writing this over and over, then he won't grade you down for omitting it from your test answers and term paper.

This is a great perspective on pedantry

Well the Mongols are the exception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqcVro-3f4I

I think the fact that they were coming out of rather than heading into the steppe was a major factor.

Familiar territory / home ground, also well-practiced in foraging within that type of terrain.

Mongol spacecraft do tend to have a rather high center of gravity, but they land with sufficient velocity to imbed the landing spire of their spear-like ships deep into the crust for stability and dramatic effect.

Ha! Mongols don’t need spacecrafts to reach the Moon!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXRcemSSI78

> 2. Make sure your robotic lunar lander has a low center of gravity.

Also, make sure your robotic private spacecraft doesn't land on the edge of a crater. Or partly on a big rock. Or where a rock or ledge is high enough between the legs to reach the rest of the craft.

Thanks. I'll be sure to put that in the mission logs. Also do not park next to a space bar.

It's not just the center of gravity. I think people really underestimate how hard landing on the Moon is, because counter-intuitively, the lack of an atmosphere makes things harder, not easier. Landing on Mars (or even Venus (!!) - which is the first other planet we ever landed on) is easy mode by comparison.

With the lack of atmosphere is that there is no 'natural' attitude/orientation correction. If you're tilted 5 degrees then you'll stay that way. With an atmosphere drag and aerodynamic forces can be used to ensure a proper orientation.

'Just make sure you come down straight' isn't so easy because when you enter the Moon's 'orbit' (not necessary, speaking colloquially) you're traveling extremely fast. And so to land you need to zero out your horizontal and vertical velocities. You do this by literally turning around the opposite direction and thrusting. And then you need to simultaneously also ensure your vertical velocity stays near zero as you approach the surface.

And then finally you need to come down with your vertical velocity at near zero, your horizontal velocity at zero, and perfectly orientated. This is really friggin hard. If you have even a hair of velocity you're going to bounce, skid, and otherwise do nasty things - which is why so many landers end up on their side, if not upside down. And then there's the Moon's surface itself. Come in on an even slightly unlevel terrain and again you're in for a wild ride.

A bit of Kerbal Space Program really makes you appreciate what an ordeal a satellite landing is. And that is a much simplified setting with e.g., no control lag (even on unmanned crafts), a much closer satellite, etc.

Even just designing a craft that will not topple once landed is punishing.

So are you saying that landing the lunar lander in 1969 was substantially harder than SpaceX landing its boosters back on Earth?

In 1969 they used a pilot, and a very good one too.

Surveyor 1 in 1966 is a much better comparison.

Yes. SpaceX absolutely depends on the v^2 automatic deceleration effect the atmosphere provides. They also depend on GPS which is not available on the moon. SpaceX also takes advantage of 50 years of improvement in orientation sensors, INS, image analysis, thrust vectoring servos, and thrust control.

As another post points out, the Apollo landings had real pilots who could look out the window. It's a testament to their skills that they all made it home.

Thanks for the context. Agreed it's amazing what people can do it such an unforgiving environment.

Kind of passed over in the discussion of the science and toppling - but did they give any idea why it landed 250 miles from its intended landing site? Seems like a really large error?

Really funny spin from their PR department too:

> “the most southernmost lunar landing and surface operations ever achieved”.

> “This area has been avoided due to its rugged terrain and Intuitive Machines believes the insights and achievements from IM-2 will open this region for further space exploration.”

I wonder if this 250 mile error is why they ended so far south in the first place.

As I recall, Apollo 11 was off by 4 miles downrange, which was considered good but not precise. More work on the guidance / navigation system allowed for a precision landing in Apollo 12 (to touch down near a Surveyor probe).

If you want to read about this in fascinating detail, I highly recommend the book "Digital Apollo" by David A. Mindell.

David's book spends a lot of time dwelling on the tension between highly automated systems and the role of the human in them, and the HCI factors of the Apollo missions. They also recap each landing through that lens, including the major changes done to the Lunar Module UI (physical + software) and the landing script/programs for each mission and how things worked out in practice and how it was debriefed after. If you want the insight look at the decision to go for precision landing, how (and how well) it was achieved and how everyone involved felt about it, this is probably your best one-stop go-to.

And for anyone working in embedded UI, or around automation, etc. it's a wondeful mind-sharpener with many lessons in an inspiring applied context.

The Apollo user interface and computer were so state of the art that many of the problems and solutions remain quite similar today. I work in a similar area (cars, with ever-increasing amounts of automation, driver assistance and connectivity) and some of the debates and on-the-job exchanges and meeting notes cited in the book could be straight out of my day job 60 years later with only minute differences. Some of the "Lessons on Software Development"-type docs penned by Apollo engineers in the aftermath of the program (trade-offs of platform approaches and HW abstractions vs. optimization, how to get a handle on quality and testing, etc.) also still read absolutely modern to this day, almost with greater summarizing clarity than what decades of paradigms and jargon have slathered on top.

Thanks for that recommendation. Mendell's other book is not as exciting but they both are the pinnicle of historic technical writing, and yes, this is a sharepining tool for UI, enough to make it required reading.

Of course his interactions with the Apollo engineers is priceless. I worked for one such engineer, and the strain of perfection was great discipline.

It’s 250m which isn’t bad and suggests they intended it to be the southern most probe.

According to IM's website, it landed within 250 _meters_ of the intended site - could there be a unit confusion (m / mi) somewhere in the press chain?

https://www.intuitivemachines.com/im-2

250 meters is very respectable for a first try.

Apollo 14 and 12 achieved 30 meters and 163 meters with human piloting, respectively, and that's after the program made precision landing a high-effort mission goal. The automated missions of the 60s-70s were often off target by a kilometre or more, but Surveyor 3 came in within 200 meters as well in '67.

Japan did a mission in 2024 with the express purpose of achieving automated precision landing - SLIM, nicknamed "Moon Sniper" - and hit 55 meters off center of a 100-by-100 elipse despite losing a main engine nozzle during descent (but also landed on its side, bummer). 50-150 meters is what the Chinese missions in the 2010s generally managed to do at times as well. I think Chang'e 5 (2020) holds the present record at within 10 meters.

Is 50 year old technology and expertise a good standard for comparison for modern tech?

I'd say relative to the difficulty of accuracy, the hostility of the environment, the known "lumpiness" of the moon, and the challenges of testing any of it in advance...yes?

Well when I was a child I tried to land on the moon but missed by about 384,000 km. That was only about 30 years ago, so their doing a heck of a lot better then that which is something!

Before that I tried to get to the moon. I climbed the nearest tree. Good progress at first ...

250 miles? The mission official website of Intuitive Machines says 250 meters. From https://www.intuitivemachines.com/im-2

> HOUSTON, TX – March 7, 2025 – Intuitive Machines, Inc. (Nasdaq: LUNR, LUNRW) (“Intuitive Machines”) (“Company”), a leading space exploration, infrastructure, and services company, has announced the IM-2 mission lunar lander, Athena, landed 250 meters from its intended landing site in the Mons Mouton region of the lunar south pole, inside of a crater.

It's also somewhat funny that this mission update is written in the style of a press releases, mentioning that stock ticker and an obligatory paragraph about forward-looking statements, whereas others are just a normal update.

There's a long history of typos behind the paper's nickname Grauniad

And an interesting history too. The paper used to be printed in Manchester. The London papers made errors too, but corrected them in their second edition. There was no second edition of the Guardian due to the time it took to get it to London

Placing movable type and perfecting layouts could be quite a cathartic and engrossing game...

I have honestly never heard of movable type on the web or is it all movable, rather than carthartic it's confusing.

Well, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type>

250 miles would be over 13 degrees around the moon’s circumference.

And yet the ranks of proofreaders and editors never blinked.

> Seems like a really large error?

At one point during its transit the spacecraft will have been going about 23,000 miles per hour, suddenly 250 miles doesn't seem like much. Though obviously that's in the middle of the trip and plenty of things happen between the transit between the earth and moon and landing.

goddamn. it was 250 METERS - not miles.

Can we just remind ourselves that launching a probe from the Earth and landing it within 250m of a target on THE MOON is incredible engineering?

I know it's taken for granted, but it really shouldn't be.

Yes, you have my permission to remind people of that - especially the poster I was responding to. The accuracy of the landing was excellent.

You can drive over 500 miles and accurately park your car in your relative's driveway within less than a foot.

In both cases there are references along the way and at the destination. With no atmosphere landing on the moon seems rather trivia for today's technology?

FYI, The Gruaniad has since corrected its error in TFA.

One similarly structured craft (thin and tall) reached the Moon a year ago, and also eventually toppled.

Maybe next missions will feature less tower-shaped designs and more crab-shaped designs, at least during the landing phase.

maybe make it like a hamster ball.

edit: just realized my own stupidity, a ball would be very hard to land..

A mars lander was like that but air bags

three actually

That worked OK for some Mars rovers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover#Airbags

See also the section "uprighting", further down the page - they used a tetrahedral shell with a sensor so it knew which side was down and could lever itself upright.

that ball would bounce for a long time and roll for a while until stopping, and unfolding into tetrahedral hemisegments, each in its desired orientation.

> One similarly structured craft (thin and tall) reached the Moon a year ago, and also eventually toppled.

Presumably it's that shape to fit in the fairing of a Falcon 9?

You can fit a crab sideways in the Falcon 9.

No, that's not why.

I found dimensions and a picture of IM-1 here:

https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id...

The IM-1 lander was 1.57 meters wide and 4m tall, but based on the picture I think the width doesn't include the legs.

The Blue Ghost lander also launched on an F9; it's 2m high and 3.5m wide, and it landed without falling over. (dimensions from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ghost_Mission_1)

The F9 payload envelope dimensions can be found on page 79 of:

https://www.spacex.com/media/falcon-users-guide-2021-09.pdf

Dimensions shown appear to be <inches> [ <millimeters> ] - the bulk of the space is a cylinder with a radius of "180.020 [ 4572.5011 ]" which I read as just over 4.5 meters in diameter; the cylindrical part is just over 6.6 meters high (and then you get into the conical section at the nose).

The space inside the fairing is bigger than this but there is empty space between it and the payload to ensure they don't come into contact due to vibrations, etc., during launch.

So IM-1 could well have been wider and shorter and still fit on the F9.

Absolutely no substitute for research and the facts. Thanks for the research.

Correction: (too late to edit): cylinder with a diameter of "180.020 [ 4572.5011 ]"

https://www.intuitivemachines.com/post/intuitive-machines-im...

Look at the lander. Pray tell, if you want it shorter, where is everything supposed to go?

It could be two landers, one stacked on top of the other for takeoff, but separate for landing

EDIT: or a horizontal lander, packed on it's side for takeoff.

I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but landing something this tall seems quite complicated too in the first place.

go bigger this could be a pancake stack that separates into a swarm of puck like units according to some sequence

You’d be paying the extra mass cost of landing gears for each pancake - something has to absorb the impact of landing or they’ll just break apart. These landers already operate at the margin.

You do not need as many landing gears. No meat bags to protect, but you would need separate propulsion units, less the fuel for return trip. Landing gear is light weight. What was the landing gear ratio in other NASA unmanned probes? How did the asteroid interception land?

This is probe #2 from the company - NASA did not get there until Apollo 11 they are not the same... Computers are almost a billion times faster.

This is off the hook out side the box. If you landed functional units and the had some mechanism to connect them back up, you could reduce the force of landing... Oh wait.. this is exactly the plan for colonisation.

Seriously read digital apollo

This is really thinking outside the box. Please read digital Apollo. It's that good.

That doesn't look space constrained to me. The core looks like it would almost fit on it's side without modification, "just" move a few things around so it's flat and wide instead of tall and thin.

Here's exactly that:

https://x.com/SERobinsonJr/status/1879361461002371351

Nova-C (Intuitive Machine's platform) is 3x2x2 meters, and fits in a Falcon 9. Blue Ghost is 2x3x3 meters, and fits in the same fairing.

Here's a comparison (note that the Blue Ghost platform is currently the only one to succeed at it's intended mission, though IM1 did technically land safely but sideways):

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/PVz5912B1iQ/maxresdefault.jpg

The craft that tipped over last year (Odysseus) was also made by Intuitive Machines (IM).

Firefly's Blue Ghost landed on the moon last week without tipping over, proving that a modern commercial company can do it.

Kind of embarrassing for IM which is 0 for 2. I'm sure there are all kinds of reasons/excuses for why IM's landers fell over and I'm sure their mission profiles are different from Firefly's, but from a high level perspective I'm sure senior leaders at NASA are reconsidering giving any new contracts to IM.

> I'm sure senior leaders at NASA are reconsidering giving any new contracts to IM.

at NASA, and DOGE, when they catch wind of it

bagholders on reddit trying to understand the 50% drop have not been open to anything rational that explains the 50% drop

so far I've gotten "You are blinded by dumb hate." for pointing out that $LUNR's unintuitive machines getting contracts from Nasa are their only business plan, as if this is a partisan thing

Shit, NASA does space stuff, it fails sometimes! Do we want to only fund things we know to be 100% easy to do? And don't fucking tell me, "we already landed on the moon once, how hard can it be?" because this shit is really fucking hard and takes lots of cash and a lot of what apppears to be "waste" or "failure" on a first order approximation, but in reality is actually "learned knowledge".

I can't believe people think they're going to "make america great again" by cutting funding for all the stuff that makes America an economic, cultural, and academic powerhouse.

They shouldn't just cancel, but with the same kind of failure twice in a row it seems they should require correcting the tipping-over issue before trying a third time.

They should ask the moon for a refund, or at least a "thank you".

Once upon a time a bunch of nerds failed 3 times in a row while launching small rockets from an atoll. Some 20 years later they are now 13k+ nerds, they're launching every other day, land their boosters and are slowly becoming an ISP with a rocket launching side business.

Space is hard. There's nothing "embarrassing" in controlled landing on the freakin Moon with a shoestring budget, even if the landers fell over. Reddit's r/technology is leaking in this thread.

> Once upon a time a bunch of nerds failed 3 times in a row while launching small rockets from an atoll

Once upon a time most planes crashed. Then the state of the art advanced.

If IM can’t publish a convincing root-cause analysis for why their landers keep tipping over while their competitors’ don’t, they shouldn’t get new contracts and existing ones should be revisited.

I thought the same, but ...

1) private companies landing on the moon is a brand new thing in a very difficult technology. If we want to encourage it, maybe we should minimize risk.

2) what were their mission goals? Maybe it was just to stick the landing, test landing gear, etc. (There is a bunch of equipment on there for other things, so they must have had some other plans.)

3) what is the difference between a private company and NASA doing it? That is, why is it so hard to do what NASA did over 50 years ago, without things falling over, etc.? Is it budget? Time for testing and retesting (investors want returns)? Talent? Is NASA witholding its secret ingredients like a self-centered chef? (At least some national space agencies also have had problems, like JAXA, but I'm not sure how widespread that is.)

Edit: I would make it competitive, though. That's the point of private business - it can fail and disappear. Compete for the next contract.

We are definitely closer to the biplanes era of landing on the moon than we are to the Concorde era, as far as technological readiness goes. The pace of moon landers created has been much slower than the pace of airplanes built was in the early days.

Yup. The most fun fact about early aviation I heard that highlights how fast and loose everything was is that General Henry Harley Arnold in charge of the US Army Air Force during World War II learned to fly from the Wright brothers.

Not sure who you are quoting here, I never said "embarrassing". I'm sure that those "nerds" made adjustments based on the failures. That's all I was asking for.

Worse, it’s richest country on earth complaining about being too poor and having to enact austerity measures — implemented by the richest person on the planet who’s personal pay is much, much higher than any of the savings he’s found so far.

I’ve seen many occasions in my career when some manager had flown across the country with a business class ticket, stayed in a fancy hotel, rented a luxury car, and turned up to an all-hands-on-deck meeting to announce in a grave tone that the minimum wage workers are just going to have to make some sacrifices.

This is almost precisely what’s going on with DOGE except you can substitute private jet and secret service motorcade. And instead of minimum wage, it’s… less than minimum wage.

The richest are complaining about being too poor to help the needy, and fixing the issue by cutting every program that helps those under the poverty line.

This doesn't seem a fair analogy. Elon Musk is not being paid by the government, as I understand.

The reason the manager flying around spending money to attend a downsizing meeting is gross is that the manager is spending company money (that could go to prevent downsizing).

To complete the analogy, you would need to be implying that Elon's personal money should be paid to fund federal services.

>Elon Musk is not being paid by the government, as I understand.

https://www.inc.com/bruce-crumley/why-elon-musks-faa-contrac...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/us/politics/elon-musk-com...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/01/elon-musk...

https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/as-elon-mus...

https://apnews.com/article/house-democrats-musk-doge-oversig...

> you would need to be implying that Elon's personal money should be paid to fund federal services.

I am. These payments are called taxes.

Taxes he's successfully evaded paying using the the same tricks as every other billionaire, such as taking out loans against his shares that will be repaid after his death by his estate, which has negligible tax rates compared to the kind of income taxes paid by mere mortals.

All joking aside, if Elon -- just him, no other billionaire -- had simply paid the same marginal tax rates as any random upper-middle-class citizen, it would be 10x the amount DOGE had cut so far from the federal budget.

Well, basically, that sums it all up.

I don’t make comments based on what I want to happen

An entire federal agency was deleted and thousands of non profits and other organizations were using the funding source as their only client and are also deleted now

Just because this one is publicly traded we should expect a different outcome?

I love prediction markets because now there is another outlet for perceiving politics than just debating. I take your money in a zero sum game if my worldview is more accurate, love that. I would almost say it rewards having a contrarian view of the world, but there are some psychology studies that show even ideologues like you will make accurate predictions if there is a payout of basically any amount. So I doubt it’s actually a contrarian view given that you have the same information.

I totally agree with the space is hard, it fails sometimes. I been in the space industry on both the super rigorous high cost, high mission assurance side of things and the low cost commercial launch 10 and hopefully most of them work side of things. The lunar lander is an ambitious first project and two failures in a row is real rough, but definitely happens the space industry in new ventures. I'm sure there are great engineers there and what they are doing is tough.

But...specifically on funding for Intuitive Machines I don't understand how NASA also gave then an IDIQ contract for up to $4.8 billion for lunar communications and PNT services [0] based on the experience of one lunar lander that didn't actually work.

[0] https://spacenews.com/nasa-selects-intuitive-machines-for-lu...

Yeah, was cool to see Blue Ghost be successful. And do the point about tall and thin, the Blue Ghost lander is much more squat than the Intuitive Machines landers

https://fireflyspace.com/blue-ghost/

> craft that tipped over last year (Odysseus) was also made by Intuitive Machines (IM)

Have they published a root-cause analysis?

Apparently last time their laser rangefinder was turned off groundside and thus wasn’t available during landing.

This time they remembered to turn it on, but it didn’t work very well.

That’s a proximate-cause analysis. If the root of their problem is a rangefinder, what happened that caused them to consistently miss with it?

The lack of credible comments strikes me as someone socking the answer: they’ve committed to a stacked format that is inherently unstable. If they can’t get an answer out before the next budget is passed, their contracts should be cancelled.

I'm sure they're accounting for dust, but using a laser in an environment that kicks up a ton of dust just doesn't seem like a great idea.

> Firefly's Blue Ghost landed on the moon last week without tipping over

> from a high level perspective I'm sure senior leaders at NASA are reconsidering giving any new contracts to IM.

Truth is, all contractors rely on NASA data about Moon surface, and this data is not 100% reliable.

But some people trust NASA and others much more cautious and include bigger possible error margins in their models.

I mean, FF could just include much larger design margins, with less payload, so next time FF will optimize design and could also tip over.

But good news, IM next time could make larger margins and will also achieve 100% success.

Which gives me great amusement about the current human spaceflight plan to land upright Starship on the moon, and lower astronauts from the top of what is effectively a tower-like 13-story building (52.1m without landing legs, at 9m tube width) using some kind of elevator solution. To put things into perspective, this is roughly the same height as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and with landing legs extended probably about the same width as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS#/media/File:HLS_S...

https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasa-astronauts-test-spac...

Sure, there's lots of details to consider, e.g. center of gravity, overall weight, maximum possible duration to hover and ability to accurately steer and pick your landing spot. But the inherent difficulty in "how do you not topple over" is definitely there, and it's clear the proposed Starship lander will have to outperform these IM landers significantly.

That said, if you want to scale out payload to the surface I guess you have to (which however eats into your center of gravity advantages from having lots of engines at the bottom, too).

> how do you not topple over

Projectile grappling-hooks to embed into nearby ground then winch the line taught? Just have to make sure all are launched at the same time with force vectors that cancel out. Maybe even launch them before touchdown so it doesn't topple over during landing if one of the feet land on a random rock.

My vote is for a large BattleBots style flipper that they flop their rover around with until it falls in their preferred orientation.

Just don't land too close to where the house robots are...

Could you land a weeble? So it wobbles and does not fall down.

I saw this episode of For All Mankind! It didn't seem to end well

with enough energy(like starship would have), i suppose you could get out of an irrecoverable tipping over motion by just lighting the engines and trying again. Before you fall, obviously. "works in KSP"^TM

If they can control the angle of each leg with enough precision, that might be enough to compensate for (slightly) uneven terrain.

I understand that the recently successful Blue Ghost has sensors to detect suitability of the landing spot, and used it to re-position twice while landing. Starship would probably need something like that, too.

At least they're likely to do unmanned test landings until they successfully land upright. But it seems nobody followed the design of the appollo lander, except the Blue ghost which landed successfully last week.

I wonder what height you can safely jump from onto the moons surface?

Probably around 12 meters (40 feet or so?). That would be like falling 2 m (6 feet) on earth, which isn’t very safe but pretty doable. Maybe 8 meters to make it more safe?

That’s based on impact speed.

Probably less than that. Consider your suit needs to survive without a tear.

Oh I guess the suit is going to prevent you doing a parcour roll!

hey the leaning tower of pisa is still standing, clearly this precedent means that starship HLS will be stable

Starship is simply due to the desire to have a Sci-Fi looking ship land on a planet. It’s not being done for practical reasons. It’s being done because it looks cool.

To learn more about the strategy for landing on the moon, listen to this audiobook. Extremely good.

The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon

The guys designing this never played kerbal space program or something. My first mun lander looked like theirs and of course it fell over after landing. If something doesn’t work in KSP, it probably deserves a looking at in the real world.

That should be an official NASA spec. Must not fall over on kerball.

Anyone playing KSP learns that. So the question then is, what did their tall and skinny design optimize for?

Minimal launch cross sectional area. Tall and skinny. ( Please check previous documentation )

I was completely off.

“This profound opportunity to make history isn’t solely built on technology – it’s established through the relentless dedication of our people, who have turned the Company’s words about a reliable cadence of lunar missions into action.”

Looks like the company is in alignment with NASA. I am actually impressed.

I would now look for a failure in one of the leg compressors.

Minimal launch cross-section is equally achievable for an oblong landing craft that is designed to fall on a predetermined side, with landing gear deployed to support it in the horizontal configuration.

Imagine a truck with a jet engine that lands on the rear end, then falls onto its wheels, because it's designed to operate when positioned horizontally.

I mean, eventually everything is crab right?

Mandatory xkcd 2314.

Crabs cook well, but do not fly well,not drop in the vacuum of space well. But by no means dismiss this idea. It is interesting, I just do not know how right now. Their exoskelton legs. If the craft rotated like a cat,and landed like one with a dozen crab legs...where is Adam Savage when you need him?

not 'similarly structured' but the immediate sibling craft - the same design from the same company.

not "eventually toppled" but broke a leg and landed on its side right away.

Definitely the next mission will be the same craft - they have 2 more in the works.

This! Don’t base your designs on 1950’s sci-fi movies with big glistening rockets standing 50’ tall touching down on angled fins.

Not being critical here, just a question from my curious naivety (lunar exploration is hard): these landers seem spindly and unforgiving, landing-wise. Are there bouncy ball type craft that could be made, or something that can reorient or push itself up after landing? I have a vague memory of something like that being used on Mars.

There are indeed craft like that. The NASA Pathfinder probe and MER rovers (all to Mars) are probably what you're thinking of.

Ah, cool. I'll look those up. I just looked at the Athena and I'm tempted to armchair quarterback a tiny bit. I mean, that thing looks extremely top heavy. And it had hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment on it. I also wonder if these companies are patenting their approaches so that other companies can't use working solutions.

Yep, most of the previous Mars rover prior to Curiosity did it this way. They had a number of balloons surrounding the rover and landed and bounced along the surface. Then the balloons were deflated in a particular order so the rover ended up the right way up. But for these there was some atmosphere to slow the descent with a parachute and balloons. But for landing on the moon you need the thrusters to slow you down for landing so it can't just be balloons on either side. Presumably you could still use something to slow you down that isn't part of the science mission for the lander that gets ejected right before landing an then let the balloons hit the surface and drop down. But now there are multiple mechanisms and things to do the landing which means more money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSbAUtyO7xo

On the moon, you would eventually slow down after bouncing because of the energy loss from the not very elastic balloons. But it might take a while and you might bounce into a crater or something.

Size is important. For thin atmosphere or vacuum planet, airbag approach is optimal for small size lander, but for big size space crane is optimal.

Unfortunately, at the moment I could not suggest what is small and what is big for Moon.

And for about IM, things could be even worse, as they are limited as commercial company (NASA lander could use government money to achieve much higher budget and have much more possibilities to do same thing).

The first soft landing on the moon in January 1966 by Luna 9 was like that: https://www.russianspaceweb.com/luna9.html (has a picture of the landing profile)

With the landing probe encased in airbags ejecting from the main body a couple meter above ground. The probe the rolled for a bit, once it stopped it then opened up and started doing science.

The company Intuitive Machines first and second moon-landers both tipped over, hopefully the third does not tip over

Hopefully someone at Intuitive Machines pores over the data and and design plans and makes significant changes that minimize the opportunity for this to happen the third time around, assuming NASA gives them that opportunity.

If their lander is indeed top-heavy then they have some design issues to overcome. Perhaps adding a set of outriggers that deploy just before touchdown and detach or fold up on command once the lander is deemed to be in a stable orientation. Even landing it as a ball with air cushions that deflate once it comes to rest has to be preferred to simply keeping it the same and hoping for a nice flat spot to land.

> pores over the data and and design plans and makes significant changes

And then publishes it. The fact that they have precise renders still published of their next lander [1] is a bit telling about their engineering approach.

[1] https://www.intuitivemachines.com/missions

That's pretty funny. Doubling down on it may not pay off.

The first two landers have different backgrounds. The third and fourth re-use the first lander background in the same orientation and mirrored. I would think that since the third lander has a model displayed and the fourth is just a proposed outline that they may be open to structural changes by the fourth if they get that opportunity.

Hopefully they take the bait and pursue modifications that give their lander a lower center of gravity or a wider footprint. If I were at NASA I would be hesitant about allowing them to launch that third model with no mods. Even if all they do is hit the free section on craigslist in Houston and grab all the free-weights and a lightly used tarp to swing, testicle-style, underneath the lander as it tries to find the moon.

> minimize the opportunity

Or design it assuming it will tip over on landing.

Go home lunar probe! You're drunk. ( I am kidding ).

More seriously outside the box. This one is going to scratch my head for a couple of days. It's gonna fall - make use of that fall. Not useful if you need light for solar panels and you are stuck in a crater.

I am going to hunt down pictures of Surveyer III.

The first one tipped over because a sensor failed. I suppose we don't know why this one did yet but why do these sorts of failures bring out the caveman in everybody suggesting completely giving up on the whole concept and doing something "dumb" that doesn't require control systems? Just because control systems feel scary and you might not personally know how to design them yourself doesn't mean they aren't great when they work. Falcon 9 lands upright pretty reliably but even in the early days of that when it wasn't working, people were saying they should give up and use a giant net or towers or something for it to dumbly fall into. It's like seeing a car crash and saying "Why don't we just have giant balloons around cars to absorb the impact when they crash or guide rails along the roads so they won't go off course if the driver falls asleep?". Yea we could but it's both cheaper and possible to do it smarter.

If you were writing software and it had a bug, you wouldn't throw out the whole thing and replace it with a spreadsheet, you'd fix the bug.

> I suppose we don't know why this one did yet but why do these sorts of failures bring out the caveman in everybody suggesting completely giving up on the whole concept and doing something "dumb" that doesn't require control systems? Just because control systems feel scary and you might not personally know how to design them yourself doesn't mean they aren't great when they work.

Because $150M was/is at stake and "bouncy ball that rolls to a stop and then unfurls" has been proven repeatedly to work?

But at some point we're going to want to do it more efficiently or upright, especially if it's got people on it. Why not work that out now?

Legged landers have also been proven to work on the moon many times. I suspect the reason for this thinking is that engineers like to find technical solutions to problems but when the only information you have is "it fell over", the only apparent technical solutions are to use different concepts that can't fall over. Once you know more specifics of why it failed, you'd be thinking of ways to prevent those, like maybe correct the software bug or implement redundant sensors or whatever. The troubles with these landers won't be something as difficult as "Reliably balancing a slender object upright is beyond the cutting edge of technology" since that problem has been thoroughly solved in other contexts like Falcon 9 and Segway.

Hopefully they go out of business for having ignored the advice of the entire scientific community simply because they wanted to pull some SpaceX-type-shit on the Moon and ended up costing everyone over a hundred million dollars and probably a setback of years, all because of their CEO's ego.

As much as I do not want to believe this, it sounds like the horrid truth. Feynman did it his way and furthered the science. Randolf of blacklite power was a shister.

I do agree.

Moonshot business idea: robots on the moon that jumpstart, tow or flip other robots in distress.

Call it Moon Autonomous Taskable Equipment Reorienter (MATER)

I was confused because I saw a picture taken from the private moon lander and it was upright. Turns out two private moon landers recently landed and the first one was successful.

Then have the sucessful one walk over and right the others. It could not be that hard? NASA did not have cellphones. They put rovers on the moon. How about putting a couple of spare battery packs and a remote pilot on a rover? Does Uber and Lyft want to start service early?

https://science.nasa.gov/resource/view-of-surveyor-iii-in-it...

NASA did it right, but that surface looks like a no-joke bed of razors. Thank you NASA.

When do we launch the lunar tow truck? Cash or charge?

It shows the old that getting to 90% is easy and fast but the last 10% are very tedious and slow.

> shows the old that getting to 90% is easy and fast but the last 10% are very tedious and slow

And maybe don’t bet on a SPAC to deliver advanced engineering?

Counterexample: Rocket Lab's tech [1] landed Blue Ghost on the Moon.

[1]: https://www.rocketlabusa.com/updates/rocket-lab-space-softwa...

I know space is hard but so many of these missions seem to fail in such silly ways. In this case, this company's both missions had the same problem attributed to its "tall thin design". Why do they keep making the same mistake again and again?

> "The failure of Athena....was almost identical to IM’s first moon landing in February 2024"

> "Athena had the same tall, thin design that some experts had feared could lead to a repeat of the accident."

Definitely concerned about the laser rangefinders not working on descent. My recollection is that they were very finnicky instruments.

A lot of discussion is happening around the aspect ratio of the Noca-C landers. Part of the reason they're so tall and skinny looking is that the lander is built around two linerless composite fuel tanks. Two big tanks are more efficient than four smaller ones. The legs should definitely be wider on the next two landers.

There was also lots of dust. Read digital apollo.

If your tanks are empty, they are now dead weight. Use them as pads.

If you had 30 empty tanks on spikes you could bounce, roll onto the surface.

Again tanks as landing gear.

A delivery craft that crashes somewhere else, or flies over the rights the other two. ( Three for one)

the tanks aren't empty when you land, since you always want to have reserve fuel (and pressure)

NASA and Soviet engineers of the 60s were able to accomplish this with less computing resources then an atari game console.

Scrum was not invented yet.

> Athena, a probe launched by [...] Intuitive Machines (IM) last month, touched down about 250 miles from its intended landing site near the moon’s south pole on Thursday. Initially at least, it was generating some power and sending information to Earth as engineers worked to make sense of data showing an “incorrect attitude”.

> On Friday, however, IM declared Athena dead.

250 miles off-course, and their second flop in a row. I'd certainly cross them off the Approved Vendor list.

About that "gotta be tall & tippy to fit inside the Falcon's payload fairing" idea. No, it does not. The payload fairing was jettisoned ~1/4M miles before Athena got to the moon. So plenty of time for the lander to deploy some folded-up "spider legs" landing gear, making "land and fall over" virtually impossible.

250 _meters_, this is science not javascript.

I seriously do not understand why moon or mars landing structures aren’t some kind of dodecahedron.

It can always correct itself after landing and then “unpack” itself.

Someone tell me why we’re not doing this.

That sounds pretty darn complex to get perfectly. It’s a lot more moving parts, untested mechanics, etc.

IMO, it’s probably just easier to have a few long pole extend so your base is absolutely enormous, no? Then again, I’m just some internet nerd lol.

Because making a lander that’s wider and lower like the Firefly one is simpler and you have to control attitude for the landing anyways. Making it not tip over is easier than making it spherical and unpacking it after landing. But IM apparently chose to do neither of the 2 options…

Difficult to get into or it, but assemble in orbit... Read Digital Apollo. The moon is rocky. Really really rocky. You need enough fuel/thrust for your remote sensing to idle while Houston proceses you options.

What if spherical comes up against a rock or crater wall as big as it is? Splat.

There are both a ton of rocks and 1100 foot cliffs.

Drop a Tesla tow truck...( A joke... But you would be able to see the explosion from Earth)

If we send a person on a one-way mission to the moon to make sure that the instruments are able to work properly, we would have better return on the investment.

we could even supply that person with a return craft. I remember reading that it was done 50 years ago.

On average… but think about the long tail…

To lose one lander, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness; to lose three must be enemy action :-o

> The failure of Athena, which was packed with scientific probes and experiments that Nasa was relying on as it prepares to send astronauts back to the moon for the first time since 1972, was almost identical to IM’s first moon landing in February 2024.

Does this mean delays for Artemis, or do we not know yet?

Spaceship fiasco will delay Artemis so much that there is no need to even consider landing on the Moon in the next 10 years.

> Spaceship [sic] fiasco will delay Artemis

Artemis II is entirely delayed by Lockheed’s Orion spacecraft. Not SpaceX’s Starship.

I wouldn't say entirely. Starship isn't going to be involved in Artemis II, but Artemis III supposed to take humans to the moon in December 2025. Nobody's on schedule.

> wouldn't say entirely. Starship isn't going to be involved in Artemis II

So entirely.

Artemis III is being delayed by Artemis II. We expect Starship to delay III. But so far, 100% of the delays have been caused by Orion.

Technically, sure. Practically, nobody's on schedule. I don't think Orion's delays absolve Starship's.

That artemis III date is very old. Artimis II is now scheduled to take place no earlier than April 2026 [1].

III is scheduled for mid 2027, and will be delayed further as time passes [2].

1. https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-ii/

2. https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-iii/

Am I crazy or is the SLS system is actually the most timely component?

Edit: Yeah, I'm crazy. SLS might be ready now, but it was delayed about 6 years. Starship and Orion both have a bit to catch up.

No SLS II isn't ready now. Its launching mid next year, but there are concerns about Orion's heat shield. Also, II isn't planned to land on the moon. And it may be delayed further.

Spaceship - Starship who do hell cares, it will never get to the Moon anyway.

Wonder if it would be feasible/worth it to design something to land next to it and tip it upright.

It’s landers all the way down.

That photo is really poetic though.

The photo made me think "We just need to land a large sun-tracking mirror over there".

It's so easy to design vehicles that can't roll over on their backs and die like a turtle. All you need to do is use large wagon-wheels and put the cargo/payload near the axles of it, where it doesn't extend above the top of the wheel. Then the device can continue to work as well upside down as right-side-up. In other words, it has no such thing as upside down.

There are lots of robots like this now, where if they get upside down, the wheels are on 'arms' that can just swing to the other side to make it right-side-up again. Admittedly I'm a mechanical engineer myself, but this design doesn't seem like "Rocket Science" to me. haha. (nice pun amirite)

They should've watched more battlebots.

yeah! you are exactly right. Especially the original 1960s moon lander, because it could've encountered aliens and needed to defend itself. bwahaha.

This is really making me suffer from my Kerbal Space Program PTSD.

If a space probe falls on the moon, does it make a sound?

No, sound needs a medium to pass through and there isn't (ok fine, yes there is, but it's not sufficient) an atmosphere on the moon.

Interesting philosophical questions though :)

Wouldn't the crash make a vibration in the lunar soil?

I know it's actually quite dry, thin, and dusty, but half the density of common Earth rock (~1.6 v. ~2.7g/cm³) should still conduct some sound. If you put your ear (or more likely, a microphone) on the ground...

Look up the earth material with the closest density. It's a type of cheese,and yes, the sound will propigate through Christmas. Wtf? Firefox I said Cheese. . (Myth) Actually the closest rock is silicate basalt. Sharp and dusty.

What if we had sticky landing pads? And literally glued the probe to the surface? ( No. You would either have to find a rock or you would simply collect dust. )

There are many brilliant ideas here.

The moon itself is the medium, it’s still sound. Just like listening to rails for approaching trains.

Yes, the sound is carried through the ground.

I just can’t fathom this. If I was asked to design a lunar lander… “if it falls over, it’s fucked”, wouldn’t make the cut.

Jesus. It really is that hard. With all the bajillion in extra compute and simulation time from Apollo era, we can't do hard things anymore. We don't know how.

Apollo took up an appreciable percentage of the GDP… this is a small startup with a fraction of the funding. Firefly landed successfully, but they are bigger.

This is a hardware rich, inexpensive program, and they could fly probably 100 missions for the cost of one NASA old style mission.

Exactly. If we spend the same percentage of GDP we spent on Apollo, moon bases, mars landings, fusion and others would happen quickly.

Note that Firefly succeeded at this just a few days ago.

Landers on the Moon is pre-Apollo in fact, by about three years. The Soviet's Luna 9 landed on the Moon in February of 1966, and America's Surveyor 1 in June.

Apollo landers had human brains operating them. We're not quite there yet with technology.

Surveyor and other probes have landed autonomously in the years leading up to Apollo, and after it as well. We definitely do have the technology, but having not used it for a couple decades, we've gone a bit rusty with it.

Apollo 12 landed near surveyor, but it took a pilot to avoid a crater that surveyor was in.

Apollo is like 200 billion dollars adjusted from 1973. This cost about as much as 40 public toilets in SF. They can just keep trying.

We sent up the best and brightest pilots. One of them went around a crater. We do not know how to replace a trained pilot with a remote computer.

We can do hard things,and we do them because they are hard. Listen to JFKs Rrice U speech.

Now, stuff like that spoon-feed with honey every conspiracy theorist that says/writes that we (humans) never actually went to the moon blah blah blah.

My thoughts about it is that.. 'hey we got tech to stream live the whole thing... from lift off to landing, with 10 cameras to each direction. I remember watching live the "Red Bull Stratos" and it was soooooooooo cool!!!!!! Why not to the moon???

How come we went to the moon 40-50 years ago, and then silence for decades? If anything technology is better/faster/safer. We should be going to the moon every year just to validate the parking ticket. And now you see we went from "flew there, landed, played golf, came back" to "oops we can't remote control land an box".

Did you look at the development cost of the apollo program vs intuitive machines budget? And the number of participating people?

The IM-1 mission was about 100 million dollars, a single Saturn V launch was more than a billion. Total Apollo budget for Apollo (6 crewed landings and a few manned missions for testing, and some uncrewed test flights) was 260 billion in todays money.

"The Saturn V program cost was $41.3 billion in present day dollars and its cost per launch was $3.2 billion also in present day dollars."

Thus, the IM-1 was cheap.

The Apollo program had a wartime budget and a wartime risk tolerance.

The US and Russia were at war, though they did not directly engage with each other due to the threat of mutual nuclear destruction. Along with various proxy wars, technological dominance in space was a key factor in this war. If one side gained enough advantage, they could potentially leverage it into using it to win a direct war. Another factor is that Kennedy's assassination protected the program from political pressure within the US.

Since then, other factors have turned the attention of the space program: The USSR fell apart and didn't pose much of a threat, reducing the budget to a fraction of the size. The Space Shuttle was designed to be the next big thing in space, as a reusable launch vehicle; it could only do low earth orbit and fell short of its goals. Focus shifted to science, and a lot of good science could be performed in low earth orbit; This has lead to, for example, the significant achievement of a continuous human presence in space since the year 2000. Finally, the accepted risk for Apollo was several times what is acceptable today. Even if we had all of the old hardware on the launchpad ready to go for another mission, NASA would never put an astronaut on it.

given the low gravity and $200M+ cost of mission, one would think that 3-4 thin spider-like-wide legs would be a must, especially after similar failure several months ago. Or just an inflatable "donut" around the lander (which would be deflated once the lander is standing upright).

This is brilliant but for the very wrong reasons. Make it a rescue mission. All you have to do is to have one mission pick up the first mission.

I realise that it is a lot more difficult. What if it landed on a sea of smooth pool balls? I bet there is going to be a good long laugh when we find it.

At least the front didn't fall off

> Athena had the same tall, thin design that some experts had feared could lead to a repeat of the accident.

Good grief

CG too high. Why not orient the spacecraft design horizontally rather than vertically.

The lowest bidder messed up :(

I presume it was all that Lunar wind that just toppled it in the end.

Damn... gotta take a playbook out of MIB2 have it stand itself up after landing

A ball design too, rolls over and stands up

<tangent>Not a native English speaker here, my focus stopped at the subtitle "Robotic private spacecraft touched down about 250 miles from its intended landing site on Thursday". It feels odd to read "robotic private spacecraft" instead of "private robotic spacecraft" but I can't explain why.</tangent>

I agree, as a native speaker. It's a known phenomena[1], though I'm not sure in this case what type of adjective you'd classify "private" as.

[1]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adj...

Nit:

Phenomena is plural. The singular form is phenomenon.

(Other similar words with a Greek root: lexicon/lexica, criterion/criteria, automaton/automata)

Hah. While I am a native speaker, I am still American.

(Thanks. I was aware of this, but I still mess it up from time to time. Same for media/medium, though not nearly as much anymore.)

-on, plural -a, is just the ordinary second declension neuter nominative/accusative ending. It's about as common as a linguistic phenomenon can be.

Etymologically, you'd expect it to apply to the physics particles named for qualities, like photon, but I don't think that's ever done.

I'll grant that it definitely sounds ambiguous, but I actually think the phrasing "robotic private spacecraft" is more correct in the end.

I think this is a fair analogy: suppose we were talking about a "private detective". If we were writing a sci-fi book, we might talk about a "robotic private detective", but "private robotic detective" would sound odd.

Now, I'll grant that "private detective" has a lot more cultural weight than "private spacecraft", but I think it's fair to say that at least the word "private" is playing a nearly identical role in both phrases. With that in mind, I think "robotic private spacecraft" makes sense.

I suppose you could take this argument one step further and resolve the ambiguity by asking which distinction (robotic/non-robotic, private/public) the article writer thinks is more notable and placing that first.

Yeah, private detective is an open compound:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)

At least I think that's the right term (I hunted around for one that fits). So, is private spacecraft also a compound? Is it idiomatic? Maybe. Another example is little black dress, where "my new little black dress" sounds right and "my little new black dress" seems to refer to a different kind of garment.

>I agree, as a native speaker. It's a known phenomena[1]

phenomenon is the singular, phenomena is the plural, dear native speaker ;)

google: phenomenon vs phenomena

or:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/learner-english/...

There is such a thing as adjective order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Order

Arguably "private" is origin and "robotic" is purpose.

The order of adjectives in English is usually:

opinion, size, age or shape, colour, origin, material, purpose

It is sometimes difficult to classify adjectives this way, but "private" is probably opinion and "robotic" is probably purpose, so you are correct, "private robotic spacecraft" is probably correct.

The problem with English, of course, is that you can figure out what someone means, even if they jumble all their words up, most of the time.

I wonder if the standard of English composition has been reducing in journalism, over the past few years.

Private large old round blue American metallic robotic spaceship.

Sounds a bit wrong, I want to put American first.

That's your American opinion !! :-)

> Sounds a bit wrong, I want to put American first.

That would require labelling the spacecraft transgender, then cutting its budget.

Otoh, if you cut out some - "old american spaceship" sounds fine to me, where "american old spaceship" does not (or it makes it sound like "american old" is a brand name)

Part of it might be that the age is changing, but the "American" isn't.

I don't know. It's weird that there's obviously some kind of ruleset here, but it's difficult to nail it down.

I think private is an origin, not an opinion.

I'm curious how that would apply in this case Imagine a restaurant that sells french fries. They offer two kinds of fries, one with physically large fries (like steak fries) and the other with physically small fries (like shoestring fries). They call these "large" fries and "small" fries.

You can order a large quantity of fries or a small quantity of fries, giving 4 possible orders: large large fries, large small fries, small large fries, and small small fries.

If an order of large small fries asking for a large quantity of the shoestring fries or a small quantity of the steak fries?

I think I'd expect it to mean a large quantity of the shoestring fries.

The quantity (large or small) isn’t an adjective it’s a determiner (like John’s, my, the restaurants, a plate of) so comes before.

Regardless of the “rules” of English, or any other language, clarity comes first. So you’d probably find different adjectives, or possibly even invent new ones.

Perhaps something like “jumbo fries” or “mini fries” or something more creative.

As a native English speaker, "I'll have a large small fries" pretty clearly means a large quantity of small type fries to me. It's the kind of thing you'd say sort of jokingly, but I don't think anyone would really struggle with understanding it.

This is fun : Private is origin. Robotic is material

CGEL gives this order:

Evaluative > general property > age > color > provenance > manufacture > type

[There's plenty of elaboration on what kinds of descriptors fit into each category. For example, artisanally handcrafted goes in the "manufacture" category, and the label "manufacture" makes sense for it, but the label "material" doesn't.]

CGEL also correctly notes that this order only applies when all descriptors are being coordinated in parallel; if that isn't the case, the innermost descriptors must appear on the right, joining the head of the phrase.

> In the absence of special factors, a modifier of size precedes one of colour: a large black sofa represents the preferred order while a black large sofa is very unnatural. But this constraint can be overridden, as in [ii]: the context here is one where it has already been established that I want a large sofa, so that now only the colour is at issue. Black is thus interpreted restrictively, picking out a subset of the large sofas, and in this context in can precede large.

> while a new cotton shirt, say, is normally preferred over a cotton new shirt, the latter is not ungrammatical. It is admissible, for example, in a context where there has been talk of new shirts, and the concern is with different kinds of new shirt.

[Returning to that earlier example, you'd always expect an artisanally handcrafted Belgian waffle and not a Belgian artisanally handcrafted waffle because "Belgian waffle" is its own idea. "Belgian" and "handcrafted" are not parallel; this is a Belgian waffle that is handcrafted, not a waffle that is handcrafted and also Belgian.]

I was surprised to learn that ESL classes emphasize descriptor order so heavily. It is a real rule of fluent English usage. But the only thing that can happen if you get it wrong is that other people notice you're foreign, so in almost all cases learning the ordering has zero value to the student. Almost all students are obviously foreign by many, many different tells, and aren't hoping to pass for native.

>CGEL

Is probably either Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language from 1985 or The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language from 2002.

I have no idea which.

Cambridge. The abbreviation is conventional. Does it matter to you?

>The abbreviation is conventional.

I don't know a lot about language stuff like this, but the conversation here interested me. Your comment gave me an in on more reading, so I googled your acronym, because it was unfamiliar to me. I got 2 prominent results. Wikipedia gave me a disambiguation page.

>Does it matter to you?

It matters to me because I wanted to know what you were talking about... Maybe follow up with some more learning myself. Sorry.

I'll try to learn the acronyms for fields I'm not familiar with prior to getting interested in them next time.

> Your comment gave me an in on more reading

I love reading from it, but you might want to know that it's an 1842-page reference work, so reading the whole thing for fun might take a while. Mostly I use it if I want to look up how it treats some phenomenon that's caught my interest.

So far I've always been able to find a discussion of whatever it was that I wanted to look up, which is a testament to both the quality of the treatment and the quality of the index.

You are likely aware of the English language's feature of multiple adjectives (that are modifying the same noun) needing to appear in a certain order to sound "correct". So for example "yellow big balloon" sounds wrong but "big yellow balloon" sounds right. This is because SIZE is supposed to come before COLOR in standard English phrases.

In this case, "robotic" and "private" could be similar enough in category to be confusing. In the Order of Adjectives[0], "robotic" is in the TYPE category, near the bottom of the list, and "private" seems to fit in that same category at first glance. By that interpretation, either "robotic private" or "private robotic" works.

What if instead of "private" it said "Californian"? That would make it an ORIGIN, and "Californian robotic spacecraft" becomes the obvious choice — otherwise, you'd think they were talking about a spacecraft belonging to robots from California. ;)

So if we interpret "private" as an ORIGIN, your "private robotic spacecraft" sounds better. That would have been my choice as well.

[0]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adj...

Upvoted, but just wanted to say it explicitly:

What an in-depth and thoughtful answer. Thank you for this!

Comments like these are literally why I come to HN honestly. It’s such a wonderful community here.

They are especially flavorful recently.

Having been raised in the states, I was a little shocked when I purchased a small book on English grammar. It explained a lot of tenses and proper arraignments of sentences I never knew. [which is clear from the things I just wrote. :)]

I found them learning another language (Spanish) gave me tools and categorizations for English that I didn't have and never applied before--at least not on a conscious level.

A rational reference, but there are no hard and fast rules.

Perhaps more importantly, in well written English superfluous words are removed - thus 'private robotic spacecraft' becomes 'private spacecraft', since all spacecraft are by definition at least partly autonomous.

In the domain of moon spacecraft particularly, doesn’t there remain a clear distinction to be drawn between manned and unmanned spacecraft, given the power of the “man on the moon” trope in English-speakers’ imagination?

“Private spacecraft tips over on moon” would mean something rather different if a modern-day Neil Armstrong were inside at the time.

If anything, the fact that it’s just a machine matters more to me than who paid for it.

Manned or unmanned could indeed be more relevant adjectives than 'robotic'. Except that, as is well known to all here, the era of manned lunar exploration is well and truly over.

I am not a native English speaker (or English native speaker, ;)), but I've been using it forever...but didn't know there was an official adjective ordering.

I don't think most native English speakers know that, either. I only learned about it by hearing people explain it as an aspect of English to non-native speakers; it was not something anyone taught me in school, it's not something I've ever heard anyone mention in the context of proofreading or writing advice, and I couldn't actually tell you how it works - though I'm sure I must be using it instinctively.

It's strangely intuitive, unlike English spelling. People going around getting it right all the time without even knowing it.

Not unique to English, either: Wikipedia has examples in Tagalog where the order is almost the same (apart from a clause inserted in the middle of the second sequence).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagalog_grammar#Sequence_of_mo...

"I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say “A green great dragon,” but had to say “a great green dragon.” I wondered why, and still do." - J. R. R. Tolkien

Vocal language is not a solved problem and hopefully never will be. I think it is important that we all maintain our respective languages. Let them flow and change and never fetter them. Co-opt words, phrases and more as you like but cherish your roots.

Mr T invented an "Elvish" script and language and I think he also did so for Dwarves too. I'm pretty sure he was a prof at Oxbridge with a focus in languages, mostly English.

Most English native speakers never notice adjective order as being a thing.

It is a thing and I suspect Prof Tolkien learned that dimension comes first and colour second. I don't know why we insist on this but it is pretty deep!

The order of adjectives was never taught in K-12. It seems to be followed naturally by native English speakers without much thought until the order isn't followed. Then it sounds weird but most native speakers wouldn't be able to tell you why.

afaik Grammar is an attempt to systematize how native speakers speak, descriptive rather than prescriptive and so on. Tho maybe with writing there’s a feedback loop, and more instances where corrections are in order than colloquial speech.

That’s why learning foreign languages is useful. You can’t really understand grammar if your native language never requires you to think about it.

Indeed, learning German helped me notice some features of English that I haven't noticed before, it helps that both are West Germanic languages

It was not. It woke me up in English 1A in college. Almost all native English speakers it comes naturally because it sounds right, and you can hear it in non-native speakers. Fresh in college I went to another non-native county. I was not facile.

Native speaker. I don't think it's truly "official" and it's not typically formally taught. "Elements of Eloquence" by Mark Forsyth is frequently cited as an early source of the "rule". IMHO It seems to be more of an organic property of the language.

there's lots of articles on it. like this one https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/597981/adjective-order-g... and it's true that most of the time it just sounds odd or is confusing if you get the order "wrong".

Every grammatical property of every natural language is organic. Only the constructed languages have the opportunity to have inorganic grammar, but most of them borrow their grammar from some other natural language.

This is an over-simplification at best. Some features of English grammar and spelling were planned changes - yes, based on other languages, but with particular agenda in mind. Generally grammatical changes were to conform English to Latin grammar: the stricture that one should avoid a split infinitive was introduced for this reason. Spelling in mediæval times was often changed to reflect the semantics and Latin or Greek roots rather than pronunciation - a good example being the change from "det" to "debt", introducing a silent "b". Later, some spellings were changed for political reasons, e.g. replacing "tire" (the iron rim binding a wooden wheel together) with "tyre" to disguise the derivation from French.

In brief, then, English does have some similarities with con-langs.

I’m talking about grammar, not spelling. There are a few adopted grammatical rules (that many people ignore) but no artificial ones.

I think it's taught to non-native english speakers, but seldomly to native speakers who are largely unaware about what they treat as natural

I am a native English speaker. I didn't know either.

I think it is a weird phrase to say 'robotic private spacecraft' as well. It would be much better to say 'privately funded unmanned spacecraft' or 'robotic spacecraft launched by a private company'. Much less chance of confusion.

Right but this is because grammar is simply difficult (no matter the language), in fact, majority of native speakers struggle at writing simple essays or fail at basic literature courses..

It’s more emergent than official. It’s not something I think is ever taught in school and yet everyone intuits it with high accuracy.

Even crazier is that we intuitively mix this rule with another implicit rule, where “I” sounds go before “A” sounds go before “O” sounds in similar words, so “big, bad wolf” violates the normal adjective ordering rule but would sound weird any other way because of… reasons.

Language is insane.

You use the word intuit as a verb where I would go old school and use "understands it intuitively". You slap a letter s on the end to make the word sound correct to your ear. I will eventually use the word intuits in the same way you do but it will jar for a while. However it is concise and conveys the same meaning as "understand intuitively".

As you say, language is insane.

Now, adjective ordering. I think there is an "official" order but native speakers are not formally taught it because it is largely innate for us. It is likely something taught as a very advanced language feature because you can mix up the order and it still works.

I think a few experiments are in order:

Dark satanic mills. Jolly green giant. Large blue marble. Long winding road. Darling buds of May. Big fat Greek wedding. OK it looks like:

  * Emotive (jolly, happy, sad)
  * Quantitative (big, small, fat, tall, short)
  * Colour
  * Shape (winding)
  * Other adjectives - needs some work
  * Noun

This is going to need more work but there is a bit of a pattern. What I've picked up as emotive probably includes other classes of adjectives

> I would go old school and use "understands it intuitively"

I wonder if this is a regional difference. The OED claims that intuit as a verb has been in continuous use since the 1860s (at least) and I've heard it used as a verb my entire life (various areas in the US).

"The OED claims that intuit as a verb has been in continuous use since the 1860s"

That's a fair source but I went to a pretty posh school in Oxfordshire! Oxford was about 90p return away by bus from Abingdon in the mid to late 1980s. I studied English to O (Ordinary) level (both language and literature) and bagged a pair of Bs.

I might also point out that I also attended schools in Devon, Manchester and multiple places in West Germany (UK Army brat).

Obviously, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and I have only my own recollections to go by but I have never knowingly heard intuit as a verb. I have only ever seen it written by Americans (for a given value of America)!

I do like it and will fall in line forthwith!

not a native English speaker (or English native speaker

As a non-native speaker who was never taught it, for some reason I pick the difference naturally. English native speaker sounds like as e.g. opposed to American or maybe Irish to me, and it actually adds vagueness to what language we’re talking about. Cause there are English native speakers of French.

While native English speaker sounds like exactly native speakers of English regardless of origin.

I think it’s a feature of languages in general, and there’s not as much of an official ordering, but rather an ordering that performs default binding of meanings. In hard cases you fallback to prepositions, in light cases you just employ order.

English adjective order is further complicated by the vowel order. For example "tick tock" sounds correct, while "tock tick" sounds wrong. English is a beautiful mess.

“Private” isn’t describing the spacecraft per se, but the ownership of the spacecraft. “Privately-owned robotic spacecraft” is the “full” phrase, of which we elide part of the adjective.[0] Here, “privately-owned” is ORIGIN in that list, which puts it before TYPE.

[0] “Privately owned”, while on its own an adverb and verb, is functioning as a singular adjective in the larger phrase.

Edit: Previously said “funded”, not “owned”

The spacecraft is privately owned, as the company is private, but I don't know that I would say that it is privately funded. NASA paid tens of millions of dollars, not just for delivering a payload (paying for a product/service), but for development of the lunar hopper, Grace, which was an award/grant.

Indeed, this doubled potential meaning of private means that “private robotic spacecraft” is one that is privately-owned, but “robotic private spacecraft” means that there’s something private about the spacecraft, like it’s naked or on antidepressants or maybe it just doesn’t like talking to the press.

In other languages (e.g. German) you can "fine-tune" the order and hierarchy of the attributes with a comma.

private, robotic spacecraft (with comma) -> private and robotic are attributes to spacecraft, the order could be changed but as in english you have an order that is more likely used

private robotic spacecraft (without comma) -> the attribute private refers to a robotic spacecraft

If you would like to emphasize that this is a private (and not public) robotic spacecraft you would use the version without comma.

That's fascinating and makes me ponder my interactions (in English) with Germans.

I believe even though this trait does not feel proper in written English, it's somewhat common in spoken English, if you interpret the comma as a stulting of rhythym and tone.

It’s the same in English. There was supposed to be a comma between both words because they’re coordinate adjectives.

Furthermore, (and not really applicable in this case), you can bring an adjective to the front out of order for emphasis - so yellow big car would mean there were plenty of big cars, but the yellow one in particular. In spoken English there would be heavy vocal emphasis on yellow, and in written yellow would likely be italicized, just to make double sure.

>So for example "yellow big balloon" sounds wrong but "big yellow balloon" sounds right.

I'm a native English speaker and wasn't even aware of this adjective ordering rule, until I read about it recently. I had internalised it, but wasn't consciously aware of it. I feel so sorry for anyone trying to learn English as a foreign language!

I'm a native English speaker and I think it's weird as well.

Is it even a private mission when, like most space stuff, Nasa is paying. How about 'outsourced robotic moon-litter'

The article uses "robotic mobile probes," which also seems out of order.

I (native english speaker) would order it as "mobile robotic probes". But if I were writing it, I'd say "robotic probe", "surface probe", or "mobile probe". In this case, robotic and mobile mean the same thing, so using both is redundant.

And although I would order it as "private robotic spacecraft", I don't think that's correct. The spacecraft is robotic, but it's not private. It might be privately-operated, privately-owned, or privately-funded (each has a slightly different connotation). But private by itself means that a private company is somehow responsible for the mission.

So if I were writing it, I'd use something like "privately-funded robotic spacecraft" or "robotic spacecraft operated by private company XYZ".

Meters, not miles :)

They should just call it a robotic spacecraft, and then mention private company elsewhere in the sentence if they must.

Imagine we spent this much effort on projects on the Earth.

We spend vastly more on projects on Earth, any way you measure. Time, money, manpower. The US Federal Govt spent $6.9 Trillion last year, Nasa's budget was $25 billion, so about 0.3% of spending.

https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasa-budget

Every cent counts.

"An estimated 63,600 deaths were attributable to air pollution in the United States in 2021."

0.3% means 190 lives were lost because we prioritize moon toys over cleaning our own environment.

Gil Scott Heron tends to agree

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