Good advice:
1. Never invade Russia in winter.
2. Make sure your robotic lunar lander has a low center of gravity.
1. Never invade Russia in winter.
2. Make sure your robotic lunar lander has a low center of gravity.
With the lack of atmosphere is that there is no 'natural' attitude/orientation correction. If you're tilted 5 degrees then you'll stay that way. With an atmosphere drag and aerodynamic forces can be used to ensure a proper orientation.
'Just make sure you come down straight' isn't so easy because when you enter the Moon's 'orbit' (not necessary, speaking colloquially) you're traveling extremely fast. And so to land you need to zero out your horizontal and vertical velocities. You do this by literally turning around the opposite direction and thrusting. And then you need to simultaneously also ensure your vertical velocity stays near zero as you approach the surface.
And then finally you need to come down with your vertical velocity at near zero, your horizontal velocity at zero, and perfectly orientated. This is really friggin hard. If you have even a hair of velocity you're going to bounce, skid, and otherwise do nasty things - which is why so many landers end up on their side, if not upside down. And then there's the Moon's surface itself. Come in on an even slightly unlevel terrain and again you're in for a wild ride.
Even just designing a craft that will not topple once landed is punishing.
Surveyor 1 in 1966 is a much better comparison.
As another post points out, the Apollo landings had real pilots who could look out the window. It's a testament to their skills that they all made it home.
I thought it was never get involved in a land war in Asia.
Never get involved in a war is good advice, but sometimes impossible to keep.
Historically that doesn't take much. Having almost no men or resources didn't stop Nurhaci.
What was going wrong with the occupation?
It's a book about how Japan decided to go to war with the united states. It details how China was a quagmire for Japan that was sucking up all the empire's resources. They could conquer land but they couldn't hold it. They could achieve tactical victories against Chiang but could not erode his ability to stay in the field and fight.
The story of how the leaders in Tokyo decided to double down on a war they were slowly losing in China, by starting a war they would more quickly and apocalypticly lose against the United States is a fascinating one.
Hmm.
Fuel, engines, and water will be at the bottom.
(For practical examples, look at the F9 first stage, or the Starship prototypes they've already tested.)
Also you'll need to assume for at least the foreseeable future that any Starship HLS landing will require sufficient fuel to return to orbit.
With enough margin left you can very reasonably adjust the center of balance by using multiple tanks and pumping all the fuel into rear tanks.
That should be enough given that the Starship HLS is estimated to have around 1.5 million kg of fuel at max capacity and only 100k kg of payload to the lunar surface (200k kg payload max for non-landing starship). That makes the payload mass to lunar surface only 6-7% of the total fuel capacity.
So outside of an extremely risky "attempt landing with no fuel left for an abort or return to orbit", you'll have at least double to quadruple the weight of the payload in just fuel alone.
Now for an earth landing of course the calculus here is different, especially since Starship's earth landing strategy explicitly requires throwing the vessel on it's side during the "bellyflop" and only pulling out of that fall with a powered landing at the last possible second.
TLDR No. Where center of mass will be able to make a difference fuel will make up significantly more mass than the payload.
Oh, wait, hrm...
Also, make sure your robotic private spacecraft doesn't land on the edge of a crater. Or partly on a big rock. Or where a rock or ledge is high enough between the legs to reach the rest of the craft.
Fₜ = (m × g × cos(θ) × b) / (a + b)