Peregrine moon lander suffers anomaly after launch | Hacker News Reader

Peregrine moon lander suffers anomaly after launch

spacenews.com

107 pointsironyman112 comments

At least this issue seems to be with the lander and not the rocket, which had never launched before. Almost twenty years since the creation of ULA to the point of launching their own design means it would have been a heck of a letdown to see it fail.

Aside that, it was cool to see two launches at the Cape yesterday less than 9 hours apart. Recommend to anyone who gets the opportunity to go out there and see one at some point (though the chances that any given launch gets scrubbed is never low).

... well... unless it was some issue with the rocket's delivery that impacted the lander, like damaging a portion of it on release, or shocks on takeoff?

They should have the measurements to know if the rocket had any forces that went out of spec during launch

essentially, Apollo 13

Apollo 13's emergency was caused by the spacecraft's service module, not Saturn V:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13#Investigation_and_re...

Apollo 13 (and previous flights) did experience "pogo oscillation" from the Saturn vehicle which caused one of the first stage engines to shut down early.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_oscillation

The damage to the Apollo 13 service module that caused oxygen tank 2 to rupture almost certainly happened well before launch during ground testing.

See https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/ap13acc.html

So? It was irrelevant to the issue. The issue was traced back to manufacturing.

Fun fact (for me, anyway): I live 35 miles from the launch complex, and the ground-shaking launch of the Vulcan Centaur rocket woke me up at 2:19 this morning.

I can't imagine how intense it was for people much nearer to Cape Canaveral.

That is one hell of a rocket!

Once Starship is up and running, I am really curious how the noise will affect the surrounding areas. For example, the HLS version of Starship, for Artemis III, will require something like 16 Starship launches in short order.

I am a huge SpaceX fan, but if SpaceX's vision of many Starship launches per day becomes reality, then that will certainly be interesting for anyone within 50 miles of the pad.

Are launches permitted when prevailing winds would send liftoff exhaust over populated areas ?

Up to this point, that's not been a factor considered by anyone in a position of authority.

Starship uses Methane-Oxygen, which burns way cleaner than Kerosene-Oxygen, which is used by Falcon 9.

The thing people should be concerned about are solid rocket boosters, which SpaceX does not use. Solid boosters have polluted every "untouched" alpine lake on the planet. Those have been used by the new Vulcan, Space Shuttle, and a lot of other rockets.

Tim Dodd has an excellent video and write-up on this topic:

https://everydayastronaut.com/rocket-pollution/

provided it burns yes.

any accident that results in the releasing of that amount of methane unburnt would be horribly damaging.

luckily, rockets rarely DONT go bang and burn when things go wrong.

Like a lot of cow burps right?

Basically the equivalent of a herd of 7500 cows burping away for a year.

Bad but I'm not sure that 750ton of methane is horribly damaging compared to a billion cows

but its not compared is it.. its in ADDITION to.

The exhaust from Starship is just CO₂ and water (CO₂ causes climate change, but that's not a local effect.)

Vulcan is dirtier because of the solid rocket boosters.

I'm not sure about Raptors specifically, but usually liquid rocket engines run rich (or, as Russians say, "sweet", rather than "sour", or lean), which means that there's excess of methane in the exhaust. Methane is a powerful (comparing to CO2) greenhouse effect agent, which fortunately doesn't have as long atmospheric life as CO2.

This is a closed cycle, so I would expect it to be cleaner, but I don't know for sure.

Raptor (Starship) is closed cycle, and BE-4 (Vulcan) is oxygen rich, so neither should be dumping unburned methane during normal operation.

BE-4 has oxygen rich pre-burners, while Raptor is full-flow. However both engines use a fuel rich mix in the main combustion chamber.

But the pollution from either is far less than from a solid fuel engine.

Interesting. Then I wonder how the GHG emissions of methalox/kerolox engines actually compare? Methalox emits less CO2, but unburned methane is 30X worse than CO2.

At least some of the unburnt gas in the exhaust plume will ‘afterburn’ when it mixes with oxygen in the atmosphere.

Aside from CO2, methalox engines produce noticeably less soot than kerolox.

Indeed. Although Texas is not a primary launch site long term. It’s a development site. The Cape is going to be a primary, with multiple Starship-capable pads.

Yes, but even the Cape has lots of people living within sound range. I am not trying to stir the pot, it depends on the wind, etc. But, if we will see hundreds or even thousands of Starship launches per year, it's hard not imagine a system of methane and oxygen pipelines running out to offshore platforms being required.

Ideally, those platforms would be located somewhere without much sea life. Though that's utter speculation, because I have no idea how well air pressure shock waves transfer to under the sea.

I think at thaT point they could probably afford to just build an offshore launch complex, or build out in the middle of nowhere Arizona or something.

Aside from scientific instruments it contains a variety of payloads, including cryptocurrency and human remains packaged by 2 private companies [0] . I think the latter is rather distasteful and turning the moon into a celebrity cemetery should be banned by international agreement.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peregrine_Mission_One

I'm assuming they're cremated remains? At they distinguishable from any other ash/carbon at that point?

Cremated remains are not ash/carbon they are ground up bones.

Why stop at this? Let's internationally ban poor taste and kitsch in general. I'm sure it would go well.

Unfortunately it's very easy to find people who agree with the non-ironic reading of this and are fully aware that it is incompatible with any notion of a limit to democracy or state power.

Luckily the irony won't be lost on those who prefer oligarchy over democracy.

If I could find a tasteful dictator, I'd consider a wholesale replacement of democracy for this reason alone.

Indeed!

But that's a tall order, but finding a reliable source of successor tasteful dictators is even more unlikely.

Better to go with finding a set of people with good taste, then use sortition to select the leader.

Wasn't that the lizards' promise when they convinced us to incubate their eggs at the ivies?

Billboards can be taken down. Fashion comes and goes. Kitchens can be redone. Hair grows back.

Things on the moon are permanent until launching is 1000x cheaper. Even then, who would pay to clean up and what property rights are in play?

Lets stop polluting the moon with garbage to get rich people involved in projects (ashes of relatives, etc). Invest on its merits, not on some morbid ego boosting entitlement.

NASA and the international community needs to step in here. The moon should not be the trophy case of the super-rich.

Also these budget moon missions are starting to get concerning. What standards bodies are in control here, if any? The Israeli's lost one in 2019. It crashed on the moon and spilled a bunch of tardigardes and dna samples on its surface.

People are going to leave traces on the Moon, this way or another. I see very little difference between landers, rovers, human ashes, and garbage piles astronauts are going to leave near a surface habitat. This isn't something that should be either stopped or encouraged, unless it's something like nuclear waste. Potential biological contamination is another question, and it's been given plenty of thought already.

There are no land property rights on the Moon or any other celestial body, according to the current treaty. It's going to stay that way until the world powers will have something to gain from it. The exploitation of potential water resources already caused some talk on that matter.

Excellent point about the dangers of international agreements

why? can you expand on why you think it should be banned?

Human remains…ok human vanity I understand. Cryptocurrency…just why?

Because they were added during the crypto hype cycle.

Just like pink bathroom tile and legacy code - Why is it here? History.

So that bagholders who put their whole life savings into dogecoin can feel better and say it's still 'going to the Moon' (popular meme)

The remains went into orbit around the sun, as I understand, not a crash landing into the moon.

There is a heliocentric orbit remains payload and a soft-landing lunar remains payload.

Same company, which has made the reporting confusing. Two service tiers.

If: extra-terrestrial life exists

How can we, with any certainty, guarantee the human remains won't be a virus or viralphage to them?

I think we should pause and think about jettisoning organic material into space.

Viruses rely heavily on cellular machinery for replication, and whatever machinery alien lifeforms have is likely to be too different for the virus to propagate.

Bacteria might be more likely to survive in an alien environment.

I thought the remains were going into orbit, but apparently there is also a lunar target.

The spent rocket stage will become a human-made artificial satellite of the Sun. A plate on the side of the Centaur upper stage contains small capsules holding the cremated remains of more than 200 people, a "memorial spaceflight" arranged by a Houston-based private company named Celestis.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/ulas-vulcan-rocket-sho...

Charles Chafer, CEO of Celestis, pushed back on the Navajo Nation objections in an interview with Marcia Smith of SpacePolicyOnline.com. "Nobody owns the Moon" and there is “no religious test for the conduct of space activities,” he said.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/navajo-objection-to-fl...

The Navajo Nation agrees re: depositing human remains on the moon:

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/07/1223351685/some-people-are-pa...

This is kind of a weird objection. We already spread ashes in lots of sacred places - mountains, rivers, oceans, etc. This is just space NIMBYism.

Do you publicly, and with much pomp and fanfare, take millions of dollars to spread celebrity ashes in places sacred to the Navajo? (If you do, you may indeed be the proverbial ass!)

They may claim that a river is sacred to them, they don't claim that all rivers are sacred to them.

The goal of the lander is not primarily to spread ashes. As for being a place sacred to the Navajo, there are no other Moons for them to claim to be sacred. It is one Moon, shared by all of Humanity, the Navajo alone do not get to lay claim to what should be done on it. Especially since every other culture has some sort of spiritual belief about the Moon and they don't typically hold the same expectation of having everyone else obey their spiritual beliefs.

I cannot imagine a more ridiculous claim.

Note that it's not the first time ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Merle_Shoemaker#Death ) and we didn't get agreement then either.

What does it mean to have cryptocurrency on the spacecraft, physically?

Sounds like a marketing falsehood to me.

I can't imagine what a statement like, "there was 1 bitcoin on board the spacecraft" would mean. It is nonsensical given what bitcoin is, and cryptocurrency in general.

You can have the keys printed on paper and placed onboard but that does not mean there was 1 bitcoin onboard.

Maybe they have a hardware wallet on board?

Which still wouldn’t change anything. The coin lives on the blockchain. Any sort of wallet or magic words is just the key to move what exists only on the blockchain.

And what exists on the blocking of a cryptocurrency is useless without magic words.

Yeah, maybe the blockchain is in there, too.

> You can have the keys printed on paper and placed onboard but that does not mean there was 1 bitcoin onboard.

There is in the sense that if you go retrieve it (er, well, read and transmit the data) now you have the coin(s).

Unless someone saved a copy, of course.

I guess this was a stunt as a play on the whole "to the moon" thing with crypto? Literally (kinda) sending some to the moon.

Yes, continuing the running joke that is DOGE

https://twitter.com/DogecoinFdn/status/1744189433274941571

>What does it mean to have cryptocurrency on the spacecraft, physically?

Someone took 'to the moon' literally?

Maybe it’s several bitcoins and the first person to get there keeps them all.

Imagine astronauts fight each other on the moon for the bitcoins!

What could be more “maximum crypto “, take the grift to a whole new level.

When someone talks about physical location of some cryptocurrency they mean physical medium with a key to a wallet.

It's a metaphor, arguing over it is unproductive.

They were sending dogecoins. Both the coin and “sending it to the moon” were meant to be a joke in the first place.

> I think the latter is rather distasteful and turning the moon into a celebrity cemetery should be banned by international agreement.

We already spread ashes in the oceans, on mountains, etc. Why a weird distinction on the moon?

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

It's also that it's effectively waste/garbage.

I think it's quite clear the current trajectory is towards something like Elysium, where the rich party in a satellite and we rest labor for their luxury on a ruined earth.

And a lot of people seem very stoked about such a future.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)

This idea often gets brought up, and it's always so ridiculous in reality. Earth will always be easier to live on, if anything it would be the opposite where the rich live it up somewhere on Earth well protected from the effects of climate change (even if it is a domed habitat, such a habitat is infinitely easier to build and expand on solid ground) , while everyone else has to labor in poor conditions in space to extract resources.

Protip: it's a metaphor

It's not a metaphor when they've literally written "where the rich party in a satellite and we rest labor for their luxury on a ruined earth"

The "Satellite" could be a rich person's enclave. I can see an extension where someone in a wealthy powerful country has a good standard of living, but it depends on the toil and environmental destruction which affects those people "outside".

I can't help thinking you're mistaking a metaphor for a simile (where the comparison is explicit).

Everyone knows that the existing SOTA satellite (the space station) is pretty crude as habitats go, but it's a good stand-in for the bubble that the ultra-wealthy are able to inhabit thanks to an array of economic and security infrastructure. A billionaire today could spend the rest of their life on megayachts, private jets/helicopters, and island resorts without ever having to use the same streets as you and I to get around.

So, the Expanse.

One of the two companies providing remains-transportation service is actually called Elysium Space. https://elysiumspace.com/

It's in poor taste, but as we increase the frequency of our visits to the Moon we are going to have to face the possibility of people dying there, so we better set aside a crater for that purpose.

Is the moon's escape velocity too great for catapult?

Of corpse, we'll need sufficient margin of error to avoid corpsessler syndrome.

Edit: this is also in poor taste.

1.87km/s to reach low moon orbit

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/29861/how-easy-is-...).

But don’t forget that the majority of low lunar orbits are not stable due to the sub surface mass concentrations which make the moon’s gravity “lumpy enough” that it pulls you off course unless you either use one of the few stable orbits or actively use fuel to maintain a desired orbit.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)

Moon's haunted meme.

I imagine someone like idlewords replying that on the contrary, we should expedite shipping celebrities and billionaires to the moon, ideally while still alive

There are human remains that have flown past Pluto and are currently moving through the Kuiper belt.

I wonder who it was that Elon stuffed in the boot of that Tesla?

You mean inside Starman :)

Not in the boot! The (joke) conspiracy is that the Starman is a cryogenically frozen person.

To add detail, the partial remains were of Clyde Tombaugh, the person who discovered Pluto. They flew on New Horizons. I think it's super cool and fitting that part of him made it all the way out to the place he discovered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Tombaugh#Death

So we're sending garbage to the moon now?

We could send nuclear garbage there. The place is already a radiation-soaked hellhole. An astronaut on the lunar surface experiences 50 rem of radiation per year.

Good idea, but only once the transport mechanism doesn't involve a significant risk of explosion.

> Aside from scientific instruments it contains a variety of payloads, including cryptocurrency and human remains packaged by 2 private companies [0] . I think the latter is rather distasteful and turning the moon into a celebrity cemetery should be banned by international agreement.

It's also desecrating a Indigenous American sacred site: https://twitter.com/BuuVanNygren/status/1743340603524431947.

> including cryptocurrency

So, not to the moon, then?

Two new updates have dropped.

Update 3: They resolved the sunward-pointing issue. That's the good news. https://www.astrobotic.com/update-3-for-peregrine-mission-on...

Update 4: They're pretty sure they're losing propellant, and may have to come up with a new plan. That's the bad news. https://www.astrobotic.com/update-4-for-peregrine-mission-on... "We are currently assessing what alternative mission profiles may be feasible at this time" (which is almost certainly press-release-speak for "You will not go to Moon in February.")

From space.com's update:

> The team's improvised maneuver was successful in reorienting Peregrine's solar array towards the sun.

Looks like they fixed it for now.

https://www.space.com/private-astrobotic-peregrine-moon-land...

https://www.astrobotic.com/update-4-for-peregrine-mission-on...

Unfortunately, it appears the failure within the propulsion system is causing a critical loss of propellant. The team is working to try and stabilize this loss, but given the situation, we have prioritized maximizing the science and data we can capture. We are currently assessing what alternative mission profiles may be feasible at this time.

My sister's art in digital record is aboard. Hoping for the best :( edit: i just assumed its the same one, but not sure. edit: it is.

"Just before entering a known period of communication outage, the team developed and executed an improvised maneuver to reorient the solar panels toward the Sun. Shortly after this maneuver, the spaceraft entered an expected period of communication loss."

Imagine the pressure when clicking" send" on that maneuver patch

> "Failure to maintain a sun-pointing orientation could deprive the spacecraft of the ability to generate power using its solar panels."

I've been in mission control for a satellite when this is going on. It is the worst stress I have experienced in my professional career. Things sorted out in the end (some bias calibrations were just plain wrong). I hope for the best for this team!

My team is about to go through this ;) It's our first pair of satellite with solar panels in only one axis, so attitude control is critical. The satellites will be deployed on Wednesday, wish us luck!

I really do wish you luck!

"Fly safe." o7

Is there an equivalent to 'break a leg' in aerospace?

Good luck anyway!

May I ask what the primary constraint is for not adding a small panel that could at least enable bootstrap functionality?

The risk mitigation isn't worth the mass? Too complicated to implement?

Actually, before we extend the panels we do have do have solar cells on 3 out of 6 faces of the satellite - which should allow us to make sure our attitude control is working as expected.

We need to deploy the panels to maximize the solar collection area and thus power for the payloads. And there simply isn't enough space on the other panels to put "backup solar cells" :)

Some pictures and more info about the mission here: https://www.tu.berlin/en/about/profile/press-releases-news/n...

Neat! Thanks for the info!

Solar panels have nontrivial mass and this mission isn’t particularly long. Could something like a fuel cell been a better choice to power the electronics? How much energy do they need?

Thank god. What they proposed to do was an obscene act of pure vandalism.

there have been bags of astronaut poop on the moon since the Apollo era.

>there have been bags of astronaut poop on the moon since the Apollo era.

And those bags of poop are part of a collective human heritage, paid for by public funding and driven by a desire to conquer space and explore the unknown.

Peregrine was a vanity stunt for ultra rich people. They deserve to get what they paid for.

> Peregrine was a vanity stunt for ultra rich people. They deserve to get what they paid for.

That's quite the claim. Peregrine was contracted as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services - which is paid for by public funding. It includes rovers from US and Mexico, and scientific payloads from US and Germany as well as other payloads from six other countries.

Of course, someone complaining about "sacred sites" makes the whole thing a vanity stunt.

>Peregrine was a vanity stunt for ultra rich people. They deserve to get what they paid for.

I'm not sure why you think that, but I can tell you first hand as a member of the team building NASA's first unmanned lunar rover, which is going to (hopefully) land on the moon on an Astrobotic lander next year, this mission is very much not a "stunt for ultra rich people", but a very important step in NASA's ongoing work to develop cheap commercial access to space.

"Space is hard." — Elon Musk

Can't have private enterprise find the secret Moon bases. /s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com