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Comment by carabiner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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