Second ispace craft has probably crash-landed on Moon | Hacker News Reader

Second ispace craft has probably crash-landed on Moon

nature.com

17 pointspolitelemon10 comments

Sad to hear this since I think this was the lander containing the Moonhouse art project. I would have loved to see the little red cottage on the moon with the earth as it's backdrop.

I know it didn't exactly serve any scientific purpose but an image like that could have been very inspirational to a lot of people.

Elon Musk started something similar for Mars which led to him founding SpaceX

Daydream: NASA adds a classic-looking lunar lander game to their web site. Except this one has 1.4 second delays in both directions - instrument readings and controls. And repeatedly winning the game unlocks an application for a part-time Remote Lunar Probe Pilot job.

For reference, iSpace is a public company that could IPO with no record of success or profit. While I heard lots of optimism for their next try, I didn't see where it came from and now we know.

It's an example that comes up when discussing plans to make it harder to IPO and I'm hopeful things will change to make the JP market generally more attractive. For space activities, nothing wrong with chasing dreams but it really needs to be kept private IMO - there's plenty of private capital out there. The price bump before the launch and after hours collapse after the news looks more like a rug pull than anything.

How was this done 70 years ago but it so hard now? Was it a ruse back then?

Back then, it was done by national space agencies with huge budgets, and some of them had people on. They tested things for months or years beforehand, refining their systems as much as possible for deployment

It wasn’t a ruse, we’ve regressed.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-it-so-much...

“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.” -Edward Gibbon

Human pilots versus automation, I would guess.

The USA and Soviet Union sent out wave after wave of robotic orbiters and landers to Mars and Venus alike. NASA enjoyed several quite successful Viking missions, among other things.

Did you know that while the Apollo 11 lander was on the Moon's surface, and the astronauts were out there exploring the Moon, the Soviet Union's Luna 15 crash-landed into the surface -- about 554km away from the Eagle LM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_15

Yet, the very next mission, Luna 16, was the first successful sample-return mission from the Moon (or anywhere I guess), and the Soviets did it uncrewed, in 1970.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_16

It only took one more iteration, Luna 17, to carry a rover to the Moon: Луноход-1; and have it successfully rove around up there, uncrewed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_1

That was so fun that the Soviets followed it up with a second successful rover!

The Soviets also did Venera missions to Venus. They sent like 12 of them. Many were successful landings or atmospheric entries with good data. 4, 5, 6, and 7, to begin with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program#Venusian_...

Sorry I went a little heavy on the Soviet side of things, but rest assured that NASA was enjoying robotic success as well, including the Surveyors on the Moon, which blazed trails for Apollo landings.

I believe that the radio round-trip delay, from the Earth to the Moon and back, is something on the order of 3 seconds. "Cowboy Neil's" manual intervention isn't the only way to land there.

That being said, NASA's Viking and Pioneer programs were qualitatively different from the newer probes coming out of JPL, and even different still are the commercial ones. All these space agencies need to try out their own combinations of inspiration, perspiration, and high-tech.

The inevitable answer is money. It was done with a firehose filled with money.

iSpace is running on a $50 million budget. The moon landing was $250 billion in today's dollars.

Edit: To put that in perspective, SpaceX has invested about $5 billion into Starship. The F-35 program cost about $2000 billion.

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