It's important to remember that this was the first launch of ULA's new rocket, the first launch BO's new engine, and the first launch of anything for Astrobotic. This was a very experimental launch with a payload only slightly more serious than when SpaceX launched a car on Falcon Heavy's inaugural launch. They will all learn a lot and try again.
>this was the first launch of ULA's new rocket, the first launch BO's new engine, and the first launch of anything for Astrobotic.
It's also important to note that the first two of those went off without a hitch. The issues with the payload seem to be overshadowing ULA and BO's accomplishments, and I hope this result does not make companies shy away from interesting test payloads.
As far as I can tell, the Vulcan (rocket), and the engines, all performed flawlessly. The Astrobotic Peregrine has a uncontrollable propellant leak (not sure if it's best characterized as a leak or something else but the net result is the same) and will not be able to complete its primary mission (moon landing).
I was following various live coverage (just as an interested observer) and it sounded like there were orientation issues with the Peregrine lander after separation. It seems possible tgat it could have used so much fuel trying to get solar panels and antenna aligned right, or even just doing unintended maneuvering, that it now cannot complete the lunar orbit maneuver, but is still otherwise working nominally.
A stuck open valve would explain all this. Not saying that is what happened, just that it's a theory that also fits.
One of the maneuvering engines gets stuck on while trying orient the solar panel at mission start. Loss attitude authority until it runs out of propellant. Now that it's done, control is restored, so power positive on the panels, but the fuel situation is beyond recovery.
NASA QA is hardly involved. This is a feature of the CLPS process. We're trying to get to a point where "basic" space services like moon landings are a commercial off the shelf product we can buy.
Now now now no need for friendly fire! The correct protocol is software blames business who blames manufacturing who blames hw. This way nobody wants to bring the bad subject up :)
I'm sure they will learn a lot. Unfortunately as far as I'm aware they are going to "try again" in about a year with their Griffin lander carrying NASA's first unmanned moon rover. To the best of my knowledge there's no plan for another Peregrine launch before then.
Very often the first launch of an entirely new rocket is sent up with only a "mass simulator", so anything of scientific or R&D value that could go up instead of a boilerplate satellite is a bonus.
13 centuries passed between the construction of the Roman Pantheon and the Florence Cathedral. The technique to construct an unreinforced concrete dome was lost in Italy until the diligent research of Filippo Brunelleschi. We forget the engineering capabilities of our forebears to our own peril. To those who may say I am picking on this incident unfairly, that I am making a mountain of a molehill, I would only ask you to share whether you feel more comfortable riding a Boeing airplane built this year or built a decade ago.
> The technique to construct an unreinforced concrete dome was lost in Italy until the diligent research of Filippo Brunelleschi
So... I was curious what technique that was, and according to Wikipedia, Florence Cathedral is a brick dome. I would not have expected anyone to use the phrase "unreinforced concrete dome" based on what I've seen on there, and indeed the word "concrete" doesn't appear there once in the article.
I would argue that we havent forgotten how to do spacecraft or even landers. We have the documentation and plenty of engineers in the workforce that have had success in landings, its just that its really hard to do these things.
And on top of that we are doing this in a totally new way with the rise of the 'New Space' approach.
"It's important to remember that this was the first launch of ULA's new rocket, the first launch BO's new engine, and the first launch of anything for Astrobotic. This was a very experimental launch with a payload only slightly more serious than when SpaceX launched a car on Falcon Heavy's inaugural launch. They will all learn a lot and try again."
Eh, NASA has been losing interplanetary landers for as long as its been launching them. The original Surveyor program, the pre-Apollo effort to land robotic probes on the moon, lost 2 out of 7.
I don't think there's any evidence here for decreasing ability to engineer space probes.
We can't figure out how the Egyptians (or Aztecs or Maya) built their pyramids. Stonehenge is an engineering mystery. The heads on Easter Island are likewise a riddle to moderns.
Indeed, it's well-documented that we have no idea how to reproduce a Saturn V booster at this point -- too much documentation, expertise, and manpower have been lost in the intervening years.
I'd reckon that there's more knowledge and skills that are lost, intergenerationally, than we gain through R&D.
We can't figure out how the Egyptians built the pyramids (although there are theories), but we definitely know how to build pyramids. It's fairly easy if anyone wants to pay for one.
Kinda related: I get that there will always be some amount of mission-related junk, but a for-profit company charging people to dump their DNA, cremated ashes and other random souvenirs on the moon always rubbed me the wrong way. If you can't do this in a national park you shouldn't be allowed to do it on the damn moon.
Out of curiosity, why? I have a very different perspective and am having a hard time seeing where you're coming from. From my perspective, the Moon's just a huge dead rock that makes Mars looks like a tropical paradise. 2-week long days with boiling temperatures, followed by 2-week long nights with temperatures near zero. All while getting pounded endlessly by meteorites with no real shielding. Placing ashes or souvenirs on it seem completely innocuous to me.
I also just did the math, and if each human on Earth used up a square foot on the Moon with this sort of stuff, there'd be enough space for more than 400 trillion people, which is a long winded way of saying that the amount of space used up is effectively 0. So I'm just not really seeing the downside?
Sure the moon is barren and useless but then so is Antarctica or large chunks of the ocean floor or really most of the earth's surface. That isn't a green light to ignore the consequences and let people treat it as their backyard.
The moon is also, unlike Mars and other similar bodies, immediately accessible to us (by many, many orders of magnitude of distance and effort).
And "it's just one ship/urn/container" is never really a good argument because it is always going to scale up exponentially. So we need to treat it less like a trash dump and more a valuable scientific (and maybe eventually tourist) preserve.
> Sure the moon is barren and useless but then so is Antarctica or large chunks of the ocean floor or really most of the earth's surface. That isn't a green light to ignore the consequences and let people treat it as their backyard.
This is the part we probably disagree on the most. Wherever we look on Earth, in ice, in deserts, under the crushing depths of water in trenches, even in fumeroles and volcanic ecosystems... we find life or evidence of life. All of Earth that we can access is teeming with life, the history of life, our history. It's also a dynamic system on long time-scales, a glacier today is the water in our lakes and oceans "tomorrow" so to speak.
We don't know what we might contaminate or disturb with our whims, on Earth, but on the Moon we know it is literally lifeless. Not devoid of life most people care about, or are aware of, which is an important distinction compared to lifelessness.
A national park is a vibrant ecosystem that can be accessed by potentially millions of people, all of whom might have some thing they want to leave behind. The Moon is a lifeless, airless rock which is only accessible to a tiny number of people and only in a limited sense.
The concerns for preservation are just so different between the two. As far as we know national parks are unique in the Solar system, maybe beyond. As far as we know lifeless, airless rocks are downright common, the only real thing going for the moon is that it's relatively close by.
Regulations for stuff like this seem frivolous and overly restrictive, until you remember that what seems completely benign when one person does it is potentially destructive to the future of humanity when done at scale (like burning oil, throwing away plastic, etc.).
The DNA and cremated ashes are not being put on the moon, they are going to be put in orbit around the sun. Its a separate mission but they both hitched a ride on the same rocket.
The article doesn't mention Bitcoin, but I was able to find another reference to that here:
> More controversially, the lander contains non-scientific payloads, including a physical coin “loaded with one bitcoin” and a Japanese “lunar dream capsule” that contains 185,872 messages from children from around the world.
The actual coin is in the blockchain. It's lost only if they wrote the private key on the physical coin sent to space (I didn't check if they did that) and deleted the key from every backup on Earth. It's going to take a lot of Bitcoin hype before it beats the cost of a recovery mission from that orbit.
As someone who built, tested, launched, and crashed another commercial lunar lander in the last two years the media around this lander has been quite frustrating.
Sorry to see the lander fail though, I know what they are feeling now and it sucks.
Is it accurate to say this is NASA's lander, or is this headline-bait? By my understanding, it's Astrobotic's lander, with a handful of payloads on it, some of which are NASA's.
I'm sure this headline A/B tests better for the same reason anything referencing "Elon Musk's SpaceX" does better than "SpaceX", but that's orthogonal to its accuracy.
It's definitely AB's lander. That's the whole purpose of the CLPS contract that NASA used to pay for it. I'm on another NASA team that is "customer" of AB's for their Griffin lander. The degree to which AB's product is a black box to us is quite frustrating.
The lander also contains non-scientific payloads, including DNA from former US presidents, including George Washington, John F Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower, which could now remain in space. The ashes of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, as well as those of former stars of the TV series, are also onboard.
Did we not always try as much as possible not to contaminate things in space? And this seems especially pointless, who needs presidential DNA and TV star ash on the moon?
A false door fell off a plane and nobody died and now planes are "failing at a higher rate" but if you look at the actual statistics flying has never been safer.
Boeing MAX 8 crashed twice, but not in the US. Those hundreds of deaths will optically disperse into the generally worse air safety record of the Third World, but the mechanism had nothing to do with the usual Third World problems; it was a software error made by Boeing.
A ton of bridges around the country are near their end of life and are in disrepair; something like a third of all bridges. This is mostly because so many bridges were built in the mid 20th century. The good news is states are starting to pay attention to this and are allocating more funds to address it.
The presence of social media means you hear of a lot more attempts than before. Russia used to only announce its successes and none of their failures in space. In making anything new, the only way to truly make it is to try a lot and the failures tell you the US tries at scale. Decline comes when you stop trying.
What ever you may think of the US, it is also home to SpaceX which is doing some amazing things wrt to "space". Producing a successful privately funded "space" company, to me, sounds like success as in, the economic model is, at least in some regards, a success. Sure, in come the socialists, and I agree with them and like living in Europe... Still, Europe is not fertile ground for companies like SpaceX. Please don't take this comment as Europa or the US is superior. I'm just saying they're different.
Not sure any large government contractor can really be described as privately funded. If Europe had the same level of defense funding it might look very different there, too.
You can't throw a stone in America without hitting a government contractor. Doing work for the government and getting paid for it doesn't disqualify them as being a private company. The government isn't an investor, they've paid the company for services.
Or do you think that if I pay a plumber to install a toilet, I've now invested in his plumbing business?
Exactly my point - a lot of funding from there for a lot of things. SpaceX derives a lot of revenues from government and defense business and there is way less of that in Europe to go around.
But SpaceX is a private company. Sure, we can argue the environment of America produces more such companies than anywhere else but at the end of the day it's a man with billions of dollars dragging a country to space.
It makes no sense that the government equivalent is NASA and each launch is expensive and slow. The US govt is seeking contracts with a private entity because NASA simply does not have the ability to go to space quick and cheaply.
NASA isn't the government equivalent of SpaceX, NASA just commissions launch vehicles from the private sector and does the missions that use those launch vehicles.
Space Shuttle? United Space Alliance, Thiokol/Alliant Techsystems (for the SRBs), Lockheed Martin/Martin Marietta (for the external tank), Boeing/Rockwell (for the orbiter).
Apollo? Boeing (first stage), North American Aviation (second stage), Douglas (third stage), North American Rockwell (CSM), Grumman (LM).
IIRC, NASA have never made their own complete launch vehicle in-house.
Governments send people to space more as a matter of national pride than serious technological or human progress. That was why we stopped moon landings after Apollo, and the Shuttle was hamstrung. And it's why the Chinese have put on only token efforts.
If it's finally profitable to do space, it's up to a private company to do it. NASA's version is just more flag waving. The best it can hope for is to be a jobs program for technologists. Which is awesome and undoubtedly has benefits, but it's no surprise that it isn't profitable or gutsy.
> at the end of the day it's a man with billions of dollars dragging a country to space.
SpaceX was originally funded, and still is funded, by tens of billions of dollars worth of NASA contracts. It's not a billionaire dragging the country to space, it's the people of the country paying for a service.
> just how rapidly it has lost its perception of being a dominant superpower
This is probably a good thing. Hard to stay focused on improvement when one is dominant. When just as many people from the US go outside for education and/or immigration as people from outside go to the US, we will know that things outside the US are in better condition.
> How humanity deals with the facts of DNA is the question of the next millenium. Personally my bet is on a new dark age as we depopulate.
Whatever the actual facts of DNA turn out to be, that we can now edit it directly instead of having to rely on "bloodlines", means I suspect that both the benefits and the horrifying mistakes will both be amplified immensely.
"Millenium" is much too long a timescale to predict; look at the last one, and tell me if you seriously think anyone in the year 1024 would've foreseen the rise to global dominance of one third of King Canute[0]'s North Sea Empire and how that small, wet, sheep-filled rock managed to conquer more of the world than they knew existed at the time… before then collapsing in a series of pyrrhic victories.
Especially as, at the same time the British Isles were busy with communal living in single-room sticks-and-cow-dung buildings, the middle east and north Africa were experiencing the Islamic Golden Age.
A lot of words to say pretty much nothing. I wonder whether this comes from laziness or just wanting the reader to fill the gap themselves with whatever sounds dark and dramatic in their heads.
> Turns out there are pretty fundamental reasons why "3rd world" is "3rd world", and it's not a magic piece of land that turns anyone on it into "1st world".
Right. What does “1st world” mean according to you? Because its commonly accepted meaning pretty much is “people in a couple of specific countries”. If you use the phrase as a proxy for “developed”, then duh. Of course 2nd or 3rd world countries can develop as well. The fact that the US will be overtaken at some point is something commonly accepted by people at least familiar with History.
> The data science revolution is not only falsifying decades of social sciences (replication crisis), but exposing some very harsh truths that are still too inconvenient to deal with it.
Right. Such as? Can you name say 3 harsh truths hidden by social studies and exposed by data science? How are they “inconvenient to deal with”?
> How humanity deals with the facts of DNA is the question of the next millenium.
What are “the facts of DNA”? Is this some kind of dog whistle?
> Personally my bet is on a new dark age as we depopulate.
How can that be a consequence of how we deal with “facts of the DNA”?
We have done amazing space missions over the last couple decades with mind-blowing discoveries; they just weren't manned. As far as manned spaceflight, Artemis 1 was a complete success two years ago. Artemis 2 will launch with people at the end of this year or early next year. We are waiting on multiple companies to complete their part of what will become Artemis 3, when we actually land. I'm not sure that the average person even knows that SpaceX is part of Artemis 3, and the entire project is being drowned out by Elon's nonsense.
I think you are just seeing more noise, but not less signal. There is so much work being produced now, and so much of it is worthless that it can appear as though we no longer know what we are doing.
In the modern digital age, countries all over the world are catching up at incredible speeds. One thing the US has is a moat on existing prebuilt technologies and supply chain lines, i.e. military equipment and gas but new technology threatens that at any time.
For example, look at the frivolous spending of the US on it's superior military budget and its belief it is the strongest military in the world. Meanwhile there are a growing number of people highly concerned that in a modern war with drones and technology, the expensive US technology would be quickly overwhelmed and defeated by cheaper technology that were not accounted for in the last few decades i.e. UAVs + AI.
> For example, look at the frivolous spending of the US on it's superior military budget and its belief it is the strongest military in the world.
One can just look at the Ukraine vs. Russia war to see there is an immense technological gap between the US and Russia. Everyone thought Russia was the #2 military in the world before the war, but nowadays might be at best #3. Ukraine is holding Russia back and/or inflicting horrendous casualties on Russian forces using only a couple percent fraction of the US defense budget, and largely with old/leftover/unused equipment. Reminder too that Ukraine doesn't have the backing of the US Air Force or the US Navy, which the US would absolutely use in the event of conflict with Russia.
Granted, this war has exposed a lot of shortfalls with the US Military with respects to advanced weapons procurement, artillery shell production, and drone warfare, but it's also been an intelligence goldmine for western militaries that is already starting to produce changes in strategy.
> the expensive US technology would be quickly overwhelmed and defeated by cheaper technology that were not accounted for in the last few decades i.e. UAVs + AI.
Russia has failed to destroy a single Patriot battery or HIMARS system, despite those being in-conflict for a while now. If drones were such a wunderwaffe that made advanced tech useless, then all of that tech would have been destroyed by now.
China is likely #2 now with an impressive on-paper military, but they also have not been battle tested in decades with lots of unproven tech.
Drones don't make advanced tech useless, but sure as hell they make land attacks extremely bloody.
The Ukrainians are skilled soldiers, at that moment with a lot more practice than anyone else in the Western world; yet they cannot flush the mobiks out of their dugouts. Same in the opposite direction.
The Houthis are now holding world trade hostage with similar drones and rockets. I would certainly like to see them defeated by the US military might, if only as a reassurance that a tribal army in sandals cannot dictate conditions to the rest of the world. But I am far from certain if it is possible. Air Force is a huge hammer and such drone teams are small midgets in a desert.
