Odysseus has less than a day left on the Moon before it freezes to death::So what are we to make of this? Is Odysseus a success or a failure?
The 2024 privately funded moon lander is doing worse than some 1970s lunar landers by America and the failed state of the USSR. God damn.
And it’s doing it for around 0,05% of the price. (~$250 billion adjusted for inflation for Apollo 1 vs ~$120 million for IM-1)
Capitalism is all about efficiency. An efficient total loss is somehow a win!
That might be the case right? Let’s say there a percentage chance that would have succeeded call it 10%
Now your first attempt fails, maybe because of some miscalculation or lack of engineering precision
Even if the older way more expensive version had a 100% success rate you’d probably still rather the cheaper version right?
Also not sure how this is about capitalism, replace the above for material cost and it’s the same thing
And money is the only cost that matters, right? Let’s not be concerned about the material waste involved in the launch or the pollution that’s building up in outer space with each failure.
This kind of business oriented mindset is why Boeing planes are falling out of the sky and dropping their bolts.
Also the cost being cited for those early space programs involved an immense amount of breakthrough R&D which the newer programs ought to be benefiting from; there’s no reason to believe that a government program doing the same work as these private companies today would cost as much as they did in the early days. It’s not even a meaningful quantitative comparison in the first place.
Yes, this is embarrassing, and proves private enterprise isn’t always better as is often claimed.
Mars lander Viking 1 was successful in 1976, a missions that was way harder to accomplish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1Yes going to the moon is very easy.
Can’t believe they failed that task.
Crash Landed on its head (I always though the design looked built to spill anyway), sent no images, I don’t believe we gained any scientific data (please correct me if I missed something on that front though), and froze to death in a week. This would all be a nice try and some learning progress if it was 1971 perhaps, but this goes in the failure book for sure. Not to say that failure = useless / bad. But let’s save the champagne success story for a company that gets it right.
It’s very good and learning progress for the 20s too. In the last 5 years for lunar lander missions we’ve had 6 outright failures, 2 successes, and this is the second “mixed success”
When nobody in your country does something for decades and then a different group of people try doing it in different ways, they’re largely starting from scratch.
sent no images
If you check the comments on Ars Technica, someone reposted an image that’s supposed to have come from the lander (it’s an uncorrected shot through a fisheye lens, though). Given that the link with Odysseus is apparently barely faster than an acoustic-coupler modem, I’m not expecting much more.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As the Sun dips closer to the horizon, and with the two-week-long lunar night coming, the spacecraft will, effectively, freeze to death.
On Friday, during a news conference, Intuitive Machines’ chief executive, Steve Altemus, said the company believed Odysseus had come down to the lunar surface in a vertical configuration, as anticipated.
Altemus said on Friday that the company was attempting to orient a solar array at the top of the vehicle to gather sunlight in addition to the panels on its side.
During the news conference on Friday, Altemus and the company’s chief technology officer, Tim Crain, said they expected to be able to conduct most of the science missions on board the lander despite its sideways configuration.
There remains some hope, however, that a CubeSat camera developed by students at Embry Riddle, EagleCam, will be deployed and activated before Odysseus’ power runs out.
No privately developed spacecraft has ever made a soft landing on the Moon before, and it is important that Intuitive Machines has been able to maintain contact with the lander for several days.
The original article contains 769 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Why couldn’t someone nip up with a jumper and a wee thermos of tea?
If I were handing out letter grades for space probes and landers, they’d get a C on this one (maybe C+ if they somehow manage to get significant payload data back over the very low-bandwidth link they’ve been able to establish). Why? Well, first of all, they actually made it to the moon rather than stalling out in orbit or wandering off in the wrong direction. Secondly, the probe soft-landed, rather than plowing a new crater and spreading parts all over a kilometer radius, and it was in good enough shape to phone home. They got two out of three of the most important things right. Now they just have to work on keeping it upright on the way down.
