Maybe for a small lander, an alternative to landing upright would be to avoid having an upright in the first place. Have a spherical/polyhedral design with legs on all faces and redundant solar panels/cameras on each face.
It's not only a matter of adding complexity, mass, money, etc. This kind of solution is simple on its face, but it is akin to being ignorant of why a car has windows (for the driver to see), doors (for the passengers to enter/exit) or a cooling system (to not overheat), and then reading that Jeeps (or to be more fair, a new Jeep prototype) are prone to tipping over on a trail after driving 1000km on a highway to a trailhead, and then commenting on how Chrysler should just make a dodecahedron Jeep with 20 wheels instead of 4.
These spacecraft also made it past 99% of the hurdles, the next try will probably make it and overcome the final 1% without starting from scratch and adding all kinds of complexity that are far more likely to add failure.
I work in the industry and opinions are mine and not of my employer.
Obviously N-way redundancy isn't optimal, but it would seem potentially simple if you had a modular design with multiple instances of the same "omniface" component. Perhaps use 1/2 of each redundant face for radiator and 1/2 for solar panel?
I'm not suggesting a rolling design - just one with legs on every side such that if it did tip over (or worst case tumble if landing on an incline) from preferred engine-down orientation then it would not make any difference.
Seeing as Intuitive Machines wanted to avoid deployable (spreadable) legs as a way to achieve a more stable low center of gravity, another alternative would seem to be to shrink the design (lose the height) to better work within the width of the faring, although I don't know how viable that would be given amount of propellant needed for the landing.
"Just put 1/2 radiator and 1/2 solar" and "just put legs on every side" is still really simplistic and nobody even mentioned thermal insulation yet, which is normally a much higher proportion of surface area compared to radiators and solar, at least if all three are on the main spacecraft body. I was being extreme in my last comment to make a point, but you still sound to me like a guy suggesting 20, and now 12 wheels on a Jeep instead of 4.
No - on a lunar lander, not on a jeep. It makes a difference (I'm really not sure why you started talking about Jeeps).
The difference is the cost to test a lunar lander (on the moon) vs cost to test a jeep, and the fact that we're only going to build one lunar lander vs a production run of millions for the jeep.
For the Jeep it's cheap enough to iterate and test (on earth), and end up with an optimized design that has 4 wheels and not 12 or 20. Not only is this relatively cheap to do, but there's a huge incentive to do so since we're going to mass produce the Jeep and would therefore like to reduce build cost and maximize profit.
In contrast, the lunar lander is very expensive to "test" since that means a failed mission to the moon. Maybe that mission costs $5M, so if we fail twice before getting it right we've added $10M to the cost. If we can avoid those failed tests by instead adding $1M of redundant hardware that makes it work first time, then we've saved a lot of money. We're only building one lunar lander, so there's no multiplier in front of that $1M we added to the hardware cost.
Of course it's a more complex design in a way given that you deploy this airbag at low altitude - something else to go wrong. It's interesting though that NASA has used that and the even more complex air-crane technique on Mars both successful first attempt. Even though they seem complex I'd assume NASA determined they were the least-complex approaches that had a high likelihood of success.
Maybe the economics of doing this on the moon, and with a cheaper lander, are different - better to have a simpler system with higher chance of failure, and redo the mission if it fails ?
Obviously much more complex, but probably cheaper than redundant everything.