Still unclear what happened. Did they not anticipate a big moon hole or did navigation fail when the rangefinder failed?
He's saying modern spacecraft can null out the horizontal velocity to land, but without an altimeter, you don't necessarily know when to do so, nor when to give the thrusters a little boost to avoid an obstacle you're about to hit, like a plateau.
For example, I remove &t=<n> from urls that youtube added recently in addition to regular watch position restoration. This broke it for me and they don’t seem to plan a revert.
Hard landing, skid, tip.
Z is an axis that exists in our 3d world, and a required value for any relative position, which means it DID NOT know where it was, relative to the moon.
But all three are important.
Related - I’m not clear how the article can describe that landing as “not crashing”. If that was not a crash, what was it? Will they call it a crash only if there are Hollywood-style explosions?
Relevantly, it sounds like this lunar spacecraft was still functioning after the hard (non-)landing. The only reason it died after that was because of debris settling on the solar panels, which made it run out of power.
I mean if my car lands on the side and one of it’s wheels fell off that’s a significant crash.
If the space probe had a wiring failure after landing that caused the loss of "investment," that wouldn't be a crash. It would be a separate problem.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/07/intuitive_machines_la...
> At his press conference earlier today, Altemus defended the design, saying the spacecraft doesn’t have a high center of gravity because most of its cargo attaches to the base of the vehicle. He said there were no plans for a radical rethink of his company's design.
(We see this in returning F9 first stages, as well.)
Just wait for SpaceX to start trying to land starships on the moon. Also vertically. Also doomed to tip over whenever the surface is slightly out of spec.
We can send small probes to image the moon in incredibly high resolution. It's a big place I'm sure there is a perfectly flat rock somewhere they can use.
SpaceX has done it. To date, other nation-states have tried and failed to replicate their achievements in this domain.
IM’s design is wrongly optimised and probably requires a rethink. That the CEO won’t contemplate this isn’t a great sign for the company.
SpaceX has landed Starship on the moon?!
Put another way, just because SpaceX has done it doesn't mean the same problem carries the same risk for a team like IM's.
Moving barges in the sea should qualify though.
Yes, the moon has substantially less gravity but it’s also exponentially harder to get the fuel there.
Did you forget about gravity? Terminal velocity in free-fall is not zero!
Sure. I'm not trivialising the problem in an absolute sense. Just going from floating barge or chopsticks to Moon is a simpler set of problems than reïnventing the sort of translational velocity and attitude control needed to get to first base.
And on your history of dealing with the lunar regolith near the poles?
Actually, mini propulsive landers in lunar regolith stimulant. Yes. In atmosphere and with Earth gravity, both of which make it more annoying and more difficult.
In other words, they've proven they have the control systems in place for placing a craft at a precise location, with a precise velocity. What requirement do you see outside of this that are far outside of placement and velocity? Autonomous mapping and adjustments for approach maybe?
Let's not assume they're going to try to use their current earthly landing legs.
> land on some random beach,
They did this I believe two starships ago, when they landed in the ocean. Came to zero xyz velocity some target distance above the water, and hovered for a bit. Unfortunately, the surface tension of the sea couldn't support the weight once they lowered for touchdown.
On Earth, which has GPS. On a very highly engineered landing surface.
Landing on inertial guidance on soft regolith is a whole different ballgame.
Which is not the future. Optical/lidar/positioning radio is the future, to make it closed loop (NASA’s Laser Retroreflector Array for high, lidar/optical for low altitudes).
> On a very highly engineered landing surface.
As I mentioned, we shouldn't assume the earthy landing legs are used. That would be a very silly assumption.
From what I can extract from your comment, you believe that the positioning system and landing legs are the issue, rather than the control systems. I suspect both are somewhat related: positioning system to place it over predictable regolith with some, yet-undeveloped, landing legs that need to work at 1/6th gravity.
I'm of the opinion that it's possible/solvable, as is NASA. It would be helpful if you would answer why you think it's not possible: what requirement do you see that make positioning and landing on regolith unachievable for SpaceX?
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/langley/nasas-la...
Athena had multiple laser altimeters on board: they failed to get a fix, perhaps because of the weird surface.
It's my opinion that this isn't something that's easy to do, even for a company that has landed on Earth.
The heavy bits are at the bottom.
Because it keeps falling over?
Consider the difference between removing the leg of a chair versus a stool.
So engineers at Intuitive Machines had checked, and re-checked, the laser-based altimeters on Athena. When the lander got down within about 30 km of the lunar surface, they tested the rangefinders again. Worryingly, there was some noise in the readings as the laser bounced off the Moon. However, the engineers had reason to believe that, maybe, the readings would improve as the spacecraft got nearer to the surface.
You send a pulse and record the output of a detector to listen for the reflection. If the laser is reflected at the plume, you should get some pulses very quickly, but also faint and spread out in time, which you would be able to tune out. And the real response from the ground should be more narrow because it’s reflecting at a single distance.
If very short range noise influences the signal when measuring 30km real distance, you’re doing something wrong.
Visual demonstration of being at the wrong altitude in the right spot: https://www.f-16.net/f-16-news-article968.html