Commercial lunar lander presumed lost after moon landing attempt
cnn.com
cnn.com
I just finished the book 1 which ends with well known Apollo 13 disaster and the RCA of the explosion is that the liquid O2 tank for the fuel cell was intended for Apollo 10, but was removed for modifications, and during that was dropped about 5cm, a "minor jolt, but enough to damage the tube assembly used to fill and empty the tank". As part of testing - and under full, and capable supervision of NASA astronauts and mission control - the tank was filled and tested, and would refuse to drain fully due to the tube assembly being in the way. Alternative procedure to empty it was to heat it with the internal heater and have the liquid O2 simply evaporate. BUT! The heater inside was originally spec'ed to use 28V, but was upgraded to 65V, and everything in it was redesigned to do so, EXCEPT the thermostat inside the tank itself. The thermostat was supposed to provide temperature control and shut the heating process off if temperatures exceed things. Well, during that ground draining operation the 65V fried the thermostat, and the temp gauge on the ground only went up to 85 degrees. The insides of the tank went up to a 1000, which cracked the insulation on the wires of the motor designed to stir the tank, and those arced while in transit to moon and boom, made that mission what it was.
So yeah, space is hard. I am sure the mission people for the lander will do their design review and I look forward to their findings.
The Columbia disaster is a partial exception --- the proximate triggering factor occurred during (very early) flight, but a deeper-cause analysis would include factors that originated on the ground in design, operations, and assessments of earlier incidents.
And also typically occurring on the ground / before the flight. Even where considerations such as crew resource management / cultures of deference (still a factor in recent air incidents, see Asiana 214 in 2013, for example).
Which itself encompasses a whole slew of factors: false beliefs, groupthink, politics, cultures of fear (or simply conformity), etc., etc.
What I find most interesting about discussions of all of these is that they are so broadly applicable, and are often the parts of incident post morta which are most generalisable to other domains and situations.
> Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Lorisks want certainty and knowledge that they may not fail.
Hirisks hope for uncertainty and the chance that they may succeed wildly.
It is built in to a Hirisk's belief system that they may fail. But while a Lorisk might find it cringy to try and fail, a Hirisk won't.
You won't really get it if you're not a Hirisk because you think "well what if I end up taking out the trash in a frozen desert" and they think "well what if I actually find or do something amazing".
Sometimes you end up proving H. pylori or inventing cardiac catheterization and other times you go down in history as the guy who thought he invented the parachute and learned otherwise on the way down from the Eiffel Tower or worse, you don't go down in history at all.
Even in tech, some portion of people chose it for the money and some chose it purely as a passion, such that they would've chosen it even if there wasn't as much money to be made. I know that I would still be pursuing the same career even if I didn't get to work on the things I am currently working on.
Remember that plenty of people work 'boring' jobs like garbage collection, being a janitor, being a soldier or riskier stuff with even worse conditions. Many of them are perfectly content with that as long as that doesn't get in the way of things that are important to them.
So it's entirely reasonable that many people would genuinely be willing to happily sacrifice everything to go to Mars, simply for the sake of being there, regardless of any potential glamourous outcomes.
There’s a couple screenshots floating around of some old Twitter threads: “what would your role be in a Communist society?” - where virtually every single reply was stuff like “valued author of liberation poetry and group leader of mindfulness sessions”
And then on the other side of the compass, you have the hordes of disaffected single young men glorifying the idealized “working the frontier with a wife and kids”, seemingly unaware/unconcerned that the average experience for young men was to die horribly, alone and unmourned.
Everyone is the main character of their own story, I guess.
For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.
Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…”
Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds— promising untold opportunities—beckon.
Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.
Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.
It's true that nothing beats the feeling of being lost, rebuilding a nest elsewhere, to have people around you who cant possibly understand you unless you spend large effort studying their ways and speech, the constant underlying fear it can all end tomorrow kicking your ass into giving your maximum everyday.
If you cant go to Mars, move to a Chinese city, it's the next best thing.
I went like: "oh..."
Because of that, you'll be carrying with you sources of better breathable air, fresher water, and food that's much less likely to kill you or escape you. At least early on, before the market pressure reduces aforementioned consumables to lowest possible quality still able to sustain some degree of life.
The most salient problem here, however, is that the quality of each resource is of little concern if I end up running out of it for whatever reason and there is only a limited exit strategy.
Earth is an island among a vast amount of inhospitable nothingness sprinkled with the occasional dead rock or gargantuan ball of toxic gas orbiting a fireball blasting out photons that degrade our materials and the DNA in our cells. Early earth-bound pioneers of “new” lands could be confident that they could at least breath the air, but this environment is confirmed only to exist on planet earth for now.
https://astro.unl.edu/classaction/images/lunarcycles/solarec...
https://twitter.com/ispace_inc/status/1650506233575604227/ph...
When viewed from the moon, the earth's diameter subtends an angle of about 0.033 radians. On the other hand, if the photo was taken from an orbital altitude of 100km, then the lunar horizon is about 600km away from the viewpoint (using Pythagoras' theorem).
So at the horizon, a crater the same apparent size as the earth would be roughly 0.033 * 600 = 20 km across.
If you took a normal snapshot of a scene on Earth with a typical 55 degree field of view lens (e.g. your smartphone's 1X lens) I think you'd be quite surprised by how small the Moon appears in your photo.
0. https://pr0gramm.com/top/5662958 (German)
Imagine a project you've worked on for years going kaput and you won't even know why. None of these engineers will find sleep tonight.
I hope some moon orbiter can take pics of the landing site soon.
What was behind it?
I don't think this is particularly coherent in this case. It's commercial, but there is no private sector customer.
All of the customers are government scientific agencies. It's all still very much science and/or nation-state prestige-driven. What's more, it's unclear what the commercial case for lunar landing would be in the near term, where "near term" means "any reasonable expectation of return on capital that doesn't come from taxpayers".
As for economic motivations in the near term, a lot I can think of are indeed still based on public funds, but one important thing about commercial landing being viable is that those publically funded endeavors don’t need to work the bureaucracy engine to get a government launch/can span governmental boundaries. If some US or UAE entity wants a telescope array on the moon, if they have the money for it, they could just pay for a commercial lunar lander. If the DOE wants to test he-3 mining they don’t need to go through congress to get NASA to deliver their payload.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2019/4/3/18293950/why-is-insulin-so-expe...
Um, your reference is about how far from being free insulin is in the US.
> Linux
You think Linus built Linux out of idealism? Or that Linux is maintained at the quality level it has out of idealism?
It is to laugh.
Not necessarily. We've frequently been able to determine the cause of unmanned spacecraft failures via telemetry and/or post-failure investigation. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter famously failed because NASA used metric and a vendor did not.
I also don’t understand how one team of educated engineers could decide to use imperial units instead of metric units.
As recently as the 1800s, the yard was defined as:
"the Straight Line or Distance between the Centres of the Two Points in the Gold Studs of the Straight Brass Rod now in the Custody of the Clerk of the House of Commons whereon the Words and Figures "Standard Yard 1760" are engraved"
... That standard yard was destroyed in a fire in 1834, and a new standard yard was made using several copies of the original standard yard as reference.
But now, it's just defined as an exact fraction of a meter. First as 36/39.370113 m, now as exactly 0.9144 meters.
this is like if you tried to explain the difference between a newton and a kilogram to an alien an they didn't quite get it
Not universally. We still talked about a rocket’s “pounds of thrust.” But for things like angular momentum, center of gravity, etc. those were usually calculated with slugs.
but it does look pretty embarassing when it destroys a project
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...
https://ispace-inc.com/news-en/?p=4655
There's an unconfirmed supposition that they didn't cut over to the aux boosters from the main.
What would you be mining on the moon and what for?
I have no idea. One movie suggested H3. Others think mining water ice would be an idea. Others think you can use the regolith to 3D print stuff. I'm not the private company launching lunar landers, but I was just making up hypotheticals on why someone might want to practice landing things on the moon.
Imagine that I told you that I have a new venture to mine slate in the arctic. And when asked I would tell you that it is very expensive to transport slate from the already existing mines to the arctic, which makes the arctic mined slate that much more valuable. You would immediately see that this is true, as long as there is someone who wants slate in the arctic, and very much not true if there is nobody there who needs pretty roofs or blackboards.
Somehow with space this is less obvious?
But you can set up low/zero g manufacturing on/near the moon, military installations, incredible observatories, and unique tourist facilities.
You can also set up space habs / moon bases for people to live in in the far future which would spread our bets as a species in a way that living in the arctic doesn't.
https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-lunar-payload-services
This mission itself is in preparation for future missions contracted by NASA
The reason I say it's the wrong direction is not only the lack of ambition, but cost! Artemis is planned to cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which is just absurd given our trajectory with space. This (back to the topic of this thread) company sent their rover to the moon on a $67 million SpaceX launch. Add the cost of their rover and operations, and it's likely this entire project, of landing a rover on the moon, cost less than $0.1 billion.
The future of space belongs to whoever can get these costs down as much as possible. Because the goals are big - like industrializing the Moon. Water is enough to make rocket fuel, simple raw resources can be exploited to develop things in a near 0-g environment, and so on. At NASA level costs these sort of concepts would bankrupt the entire country. So it's going to be whichever entity/nation can operate most cost-effectively that will decide the future of space. And, for better or for worse, I know who I'd expect to win that game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_lunar_sample_display
Assuming it wasn't lost or stolen since 1970, I wonder what the Taliban is doing with its moon rock.
https://www.jn.pt/nacional/portugal-teve-uma-rocha-lunar-mas...
So next time some suspicious character in Lisbon, proposes to sell you a piece of the Moon...it might be real.
Disclaimer: I've lost a lot of the language behind the original argument, but as a sceptic it did make a lot of sense to me at that time. And hopefully the meaning behind the original message has not been lost due to my bad phrasing.
The copper monopolist. His name is easy to remember,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Fugger
(Some crossover: the bio says he was a major investor in some of those spice-route-seeking expeditions, possibly including Magellan's).
Space flights costs will start to become completely viable for small companies or even individuals. And for big players, the cost of travel itself will approach 0% of total costs. So basically the future of space is going to be decided by who can most effectively leverage this new frontier that's suddenly becoming completely accessible.
In a way there are some analogs with the internet. We're in that critical early phase where really good ideas, like selling books online, should still sound pretty stupid to most people. One thing that's very different though is that the change is not even remotely linear. We're going from room-sized glorified calculators to high powered laptops, practically overnight.
We're already at a point where - at least using companies in the UK - it costs about the same to launch a cubesat as it does to buy a poverty-spec cloth-seats-no-aircon Ford Focus.
It's mad that I could launch a 10cm 1kg cubesat - think in terms of a bag of sugar - for so little money, and all I need to do is ring a guy a couple of hour's drive south in Glasgow and wave a credit card to do it.
It costs £40 per person to travel from Glasgow to Dundee even booking in advance, making it slightly more expensive for one journey for one person than the cheapest car I've ever bought - and roughly the same price as a tank of LPG in my old Range Rover.
Always figured they used NASA, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/live/CpR1UUnix3g?feature=share&t=428...
Scrub to 1:11:20
And at 1:35:33 the folks in the background look like they're holding back tears.
“The most likely outcome is that something will go wrong during this flight... The primary goal of this mission, therefore, is to gather as much data as possible about the performance by Super Heavy and Starship in flight—for as long as that flight lasts.” [0]
But perhaps you know that too.
[0] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/spacex-to-make-a-sec...
This is not 1960s unlimited race budgets, this makes things harder.
I would characterize it as failing during the landing process, or lithobraking if you will.
Love it
Then do percent successes vs failures, broken down as government and commercial.
Then ask why's only commercial landing the tricky part?
It's not like these people are stupid, nor like they haven't had multiple decades to learn from plus the state of the art.
Three in a row is as weird to me as if there were seven in a row. All only commercial, while govt landed fine.
Would you think that odd too?
this is a neat book on the history of unmanned spaceflight.
Take a look and see how long it took to get a probe into orbit. Into someone else's orbit. All that before they even tried landing anywhere
For moon landings, sourced from wikipedia[0] but you can certainly find the information in the aformentioned book:
> Luna 15, Luna 18, and Luna 23 all crashed [into the moon] on landing; and the U.S. Surveyor 4 lost all radio contact only moments before its landing.
Finally, here's a list of rocket launch failures in 2022
https://www.space.com/12-biggest-rocket-failures-2022
---
So, moon landings where the craft suddenly and unexpectedly lost comms in the seconds or minutes immediately prior to contact with the surface:
Government: 1 of 25 (4%)
Commercial: 3 of 3 (100%)
I'm saying this because it is odd.
I've not once mentioned conspiracy - though others seem ready to jump to that, probably as a subtle ad hominem instead of engaging with the discussion. Thank you for engaging, it's an interesting topic.
What do you want to investigate? I'm sure the commercial entities did their own investigations about their failures and the factors behind it. They are under no obligation to share anything with me or you.
Perhaps the randomly-drummed up engineers argument could have some merit for overall mission failure, though it doesn't adequately explain failure on only the same, final mode.
Were the same engineers involved? If so, it seems beyond the pale they didn't learn anything?
To be clear, it's not that these landers hit the moon and expired, they all stopped transmitting on the final leg. It's a weird failure and even weirder that it wasn't experienced more frequently in govt funded missions.
I've no plausible theory why, that's why it's interesting.
All reasonable explanations have to be a bit out there, other than the de facto "bad luck", which doesn't wash with me.
I'm not interested in investigating (beyond doing sums on wikipedia numbers). But I am interested in it being investigated by someone more qualified.
These are groups on a shoestring budget trying to do something very hard for the first time. They fail at the hardest part of the task. How about that as an explanation?
> All reasonable explanations have to be a bit out there,
Have you tried hard things before? Failure is the default outcome.
> they all stopped transmitting on the final leg
That tends to happen when you hit a rock the size of the Moon. As these did.
I think you are making a mystery out of this where there is none.
Indeed, it's an assumption they didn't land and instead impacted, until confirmed visually - as the landing is typically an automated process at that point.
Continually breezing past the points I've made does nothing to convince me this isn't odd or interesting. I've no horse in the race and will continue to be intrigued until someone can give better explanations, rather than "it's hard dude".
I’m sorry that it feels like that to you. I’m doing my best to adress your points to the best of my abilities. If you feel I am breezing by your point that just means I haven’t understood you yet.
> They didn't lose contact on impact, but minutes prior.
I see what you are saying, but that is not true.
The Hakuto-R Mission 1 reports they have telemetry about the craft free falling. They talk about an altitude measurement system possibly miscalculating. They also talk about the thruster running out of fuel. [1]
The Beresheet had an Innertial Measurement Unit fail, then they had communication issues, and they regained communication, but by that time it was too late to save the lander. They also had telemetry up until the impact if I read it right. [2]
Which one is the third you are refering to?
1: https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/japans-ispace-prepa...
So, I've formed my opinions on both of these based on initial reports which all said similar things - contact was lost with the lander during the descent.
If that's reliably revised now I'd have to reconsider. Though it still strikes me as odd all initial reports were identical across the board. Why is that?
The third one is of course the subject of this article though we have come some way, so it's well understandable were it to become lost in the background.
Anyway, I appreciate your good natured engagement.
If you are asking why the initial report was about loss of signal then it is simple:
Crashing a lander leads to signal loss. The media wants to report on the situation and demands an imediate answer. “We lost the signal.” is a simple statement of fact the engineers can make without any further analysis. So they make that statement and the media reports it.
You were earlier saying that the initial reports all said the signal was lost minutes earlier than the landing? I don’t recall seeing anything about the timing.
> The third one is of course the subject of this article
No. The subject of the article is the first one in my list, the Hakuto-R Mission 1. Then there is the second on my list the Beresheet. And then it sounded like you were refering to a third comercial lander?
> Anyway, I appreciate your good natured engagement.
Thank you. I try my best. And thank you for yours too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandraydaan-2
I can't find it, but at the time Antrix Corporation (India's commercial space contractor) was reported as responsible for it. This appears to be incorrect. Which throws the base premise here somewhat out the window.
Thanks for prompting me to look into it again. The corrected stats for failed lunar landers would be:
Government: 2/26 (7.7%)
Commercial: 2/2 (100%)