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Comment by celeritascelery | Hacker News Reader

I am curious what causes these landers to fail in the bitter cold of night? Is it the batteries? It seems like circuitry should be fine.

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It is possible to survive the lunar night. See

https://space.stackexchange.com/a/67918/40677

Commercial chips have min/max temperature specs, like -20°C to +70°C, or perhaps -40°C to +125°C. (Not sure what spacecraft use.)

Lunar temps can drop to -130°C to -250°C

The moon gets _really_ cold, way below spec for most electronics. That's why sensitive parts are sometimes in a heating component, but that also depends on the battery. And yes, cold batteries might not recover properly.

Is it the actual silicon that can’t handle it, or is contraction in joints and connections that breaks?

14 days is a long time to keep warm something warm. That's in the realm of a Radioactive decay heater. That might at least keep things warm enough that it can wake up the next day.

Meanwhile voyager is beyond the solar system. I don’t see why they didn’t use something that’s not solar so they aren’t just littering the moon

> Meanwhile voyager is beyond the solar system

Which is powered by Pu-238 - something which is in short supply nowadays, extremely expensive and pretty much inaccessible for a private company like Firefly who built the Blue Ghost lander.

> I don’t see why they didn’t use something that’s not solar

Cost. NASA paid Firefly $101.5M for the Blue-Ghost 1 contract [1]. Just the RTG used on the MSL Mars Lander cost $109M [2] (not counting the R&D costs).

> so they aren’t just littering the moon

Well, right now it is harming no one. They can only be seen by cameras orbiting the moon. If and when humanity starts living on the moon, these landers will go in museums and will no longer be "litter".

[1] https://spaceflightnow.com/2025/03/18/firefly-aerospaces-blu...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-mission_radioisotope_the...

For context, some moon rovers have radioisotope heaters,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_4#Chang'e_lander_and... ("Both the stationary lander and Yutu-2 rover are equipped with a radioisotope heater unit (RHU) in order to heat their subsystems during the long lunar nights")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_1#Rover_description ("During the lunar nights, the lid was closed, and a polonium-210 radioisotope heater unit kept the internal components at operating temperature")

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

The moon is huge compared to a single thing we can currently send there. Comparatively, we are “littering” our own atmosphere a ton more during liftoff.

I can’t help but suspect Starship’s recent run of spectacular explosions might frustrate efforts to launch more nuclear-powered craft like the Voyagers too soon…

It's a private flight. Probably made cheaply. The article said the lander planned to drill 10 feet but could only do 3.

Whole thing smells like shoddy craftsmanship.

Give it a go, see how far you get before we all call your work "shoddy".

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