It's fascinating how the pictures have that "Apollo moon landing" look. I'd always assumed that a huge part of this was just 1960s technology (film not digital etc), but apparently it's actually coming from the literally unearthly lighting conditions of being on the Moon.
Still photography has gotten more convenient since then, but in the agreeable lighting and atmospheric conditions one would encounter while taking a vacation snap outside at noon Cynthian time, image quality now isn't better than then*
OP is comparing photography tech that made it to the Moon, so not cheap tech. The "special" way the photos look like is probably more a product of the environment than just the equipment.
Once SpaceX gets Starship launching weekly, it'll probably be cheaper to send a bot with a camera to the moon than to rent a sound stage and build a big set!
that's a great point about the lighting... it really does contribute to that distinctive look. i've also read that the lack of atmosphere on the moon sharpens the shadows and increases the contrast, which probably adds to that effect.
It was a medium format camera; it's going to be good camera at any point.
I think it had a 7x7cm film - that's a humongous, 49cm^2 sensor compared to a regular full-frame camera, which clocks in at 8.64cm^2. As far as I can tell, the iPhone's is a tiny 0.25cm^2.
Combine with no-holds-barred lenses and you're bound to get fantastic pictures even six decades ago.
To be fair, the optical light gathering ability of a full frame f/1.4 lens is slightly better than that of the Hasselblad 80mm f/2.8, and modern digital sensors have eclipsed 6x6 film in every respect, such as resolution, sensitivity, and indeed even dynamic range. Photo technology has in fact progressed a fair bit in the last half a century.
Of course, nothing can touch the light gathering ability of that Zeiss 50mm f/0.7, but then that lens wasn't very sharp anyway and modern digital sensors can go up to way higher ISO than possible with film while still making decent pictures.
I am no expert, but to my knowledge the space flight tech evolves very slowly, if at all. One reason for that is that modern tech is supposedly too sensitive to radiation. So you want to balance what's worthwhile to upgrade, and fancy videos are probably low on that list.
The paper is 12 years old. If there haven't been other methods to evaluate modern commercial tech, then it's an actual proof of tech evolving slowly due to radiation concerns. Even the process pointed out in the paper requires resources, but it just got a bit faster in the last years.
Apart from that, adding new components is also costly. You just don't order a random megapixel camera from alibaba and slam it on your 1bn space project.
Considering I made clear that i am no expert and my claims were under that context your response was simply arrogant and not helpful.
Well, you were the one telling me "space tech evolves slowly", when Apollo was taking their pictures with a film coconut, Firefly is using a digital apple, and yet the output still looks eerily similar.
Hopefully you can see that from a raw tech level, there's practically no overlap between those things at all. The technology has moved on _completely_.
I'm familiar with the Mariner camera. It's pretty fascinating. There obviously no way to return film from a Mars flyby, so they had to take a digital approach. But the technology was so crude in 1965 that they literally had to paint the "digital" images by hand in order to get a visual output. It's a fascinating story.
Suffice it to say that this technique has essentially no relation to today's digital cameras, apart from using electrons or something. The Apollo missions did not use digital cameras; they used film, which could produce superb high-resolution images, provided you could return it to Earth.
You can actually learn things in this forum, if you listen to people who know what they're talking about.
You simply dumped me with the inane digital / analog hint. Like I missed that transition. Excuse me? YOU started to talk about analog photography, just to make me look like an idiot.
Just saying it uses digital photography doesn't give me any clue. Is the tech bleeding edge or 20 years old?
My initial argument was that it takes time to add new tech to space flight, due to radiation concerns. Your argument is that they use digital tech now. Which doesn't disprove my point, nor does it point out any mistakes I made.
we get a taste of this light when out in the countryside when it's a full moon. Very bright but cold light. Full, hard shadows. Just black and white. No diffraction, no softness.
It's like many of the current LED car and street lights.
How would that work? The hardness of the light on the moon is because the moon has no atmosphere. Moonlight at night is still affected by the atmosphere in the same way sunlight is.
It's because the moonlight is comparatively dim. Even when your eyes have fully adjusted there is a threshold below which you just can't pick up the light. The scattered moonlight is below your detection threshold so the shadows appear completely black. Your color cones are also less sensitive than the black and white rods, so colors are muted or even missing and you are left with a landscape of stark greys just like the moon.
These pictures are great - maybe it's time for me to get a new desktop background.
Kinda related: some years ago NASA published all the Apollo missions pictures. I downloaded all of them (hundreds, maybe bit more), acting as a photo editor then I selected "good ones", cropped them to 16:10 format and made a background picture pack - I'm using it on all my devices since then. If someone is interested, they're published at [0] - feel free to use.
I did something similar with their lunar libration videos captures by the LRO [1], using the frames from the video with the Windows desktop background 'slideshow' functionality (desktop background changes once a minute).
It looks fake. Turns out what looks real is shaped by experience in Earth atmosphere at Earth scale with Earth gravity. Those 70s and 80s sci-fi movies with close ups of plaster models turn out to have gotten it right. Even things like the earth panning behind the completely motionless ship looks like a bad composite job, because nothing is ever that motionless except a static image.
This is an interesting tangent. Is it Flickr's copyright rules that make it attractive? Or, something else? Lack of existing competitors? Not associated with a social media account?
Because its continued existence has been in grave doubt for years?
I was a heavy Flickr user, but when Yahoo sold it to SmugMug in 2018, I basically assumed it was going to be either merged out of distinct existence or shuttered. I downloaded an archive of all my stuff and stopped using it altogether. Because what’s the point of using a platform that’s so obviously no longer viable…was my thinking at the time. I would never have guessed it would remain alive this long but it’s still not anything I would want to invest time in or rely on anymore.
Yeah I did a brief scan and a brief search for opinions on their practices when I saw the comment I initially replied to and didn’t find anything concerning. Doesn’t mean there isn’t anything, but it either wasn’t serious enough to be surfaced, or nobody more knowledgeable than me has looked.
How are the videos captured or processed? The solar lens flares are smoothly interpolated but the moon surface shows lower FPS, almost feels like the flares were on a separate layer.
My guess: they are the same update rate. The lens flares have blurrier edges and move less across the screen. This makes the jumps less obvious.
CGI animations also add blurring, and even your eyes have an integration time that will make fast moving objects blurry. So your brain good at interpolating blurry edges.
Why does the moon looks soft/smooth in the videos? Is it because the material is soft? Or a scale thing. If you consider mountains on Earth they look jagged.
- Wow but the moon is 3D. Like, when we see shots of Earth, the ground always looks so flat, but the depth of the craters and the heights of the ridges is really, really amazing to see
- ...KSP did a really good job mimicking the real thing
One of the coolest things ever is you can see the shadows and depths of the craters on the moon from here on Earth, with a cheap ~$15 telescope or probably binoculars too. I remember buying the galileoscope for $15 many years ago and was absolutely shocked how cool the moon looked, and how 3D.
Pro-tip: the full moon isn't so fun to look at, you want some level of crescent moon so you can avoid getting overloaded on the brightness.
(You can also stay up for a few hours and actually observe Io revolving around Jupiter, I think it takes most of the night to get 1/4 of the way around. Pretty obvious revolutions when you keep observing throughout the night.)
I noticed this too. Something about the perspective is unnerving, like an amusement park ride. You can see clearly that the moon is small, the craters are big, and the orbiting spacecraft is moving really really fast, all at the same time. None of that is apparent from video of low Earth orbit. And then the stark lighting makes it feel even more bizarre and alien.
The most 3-D experience that I have had with the moon, on the cheap, is when its not in it's full phase. With a cheap telescope, when you observe the edge of the partial-phase moon's crescent, you see the "terminator." It suddenly feels so different, finally you see the moon's bumpy spherical nature. It's like you are flying just above it.
> The terminator is where you'll see the most pronounced shadows cast by the lunar features like craters, mountains, and valleys. This is because the Sun is at a low angle relative to the lunar surface, emphasizing the topography and allowing you to see craters and other features in sharp relief
> - ...KSP did a really good job mimicking the real thing
The pic with the shadow of the lander is really close to what you get out of KSP when you first land on Mun or Minmus. Really really cool. Congrats to everyone who made this happen!
Much smaller, no atmosphere. You can get a lot closer to it in orbit. Until Apollo 14, the LM would enter a 50,000 ft periapsis on the way to landing. Dunno the exact phasing of this lander, but that video could be from a similar height (or lower, if you have good navigation.)
> ...KSP did a really good job mimicking the real thing
Yes. That flyby video looks almost like taken straight from KSP - the only thing that made my mind stop feeling like I'm watching a Mun landing, was the light reflecting off the metallic surfaces of the actual lander - it looked too computationally expensive for a videogame.
I was wondering that as well as the crater edges look smoothed... Billions of years of Space Dust? (Obviously a fresh impact crater would be starkly different, but if its craters are all from after it was formed, and then was still being inundated with a cloud of micro hits - and then the cloud of all the dust that was left from all the collisions turned to that powder, and finally settled over the surface.
I planned to watch the live stream but wasn't able to. The moment of successful landing was quite modest, only a mostly-static screen with telemetrics was shown to the public, but it absolutely felt magical. It feels like the moon is well within humankind's reach by now.
Coincidentally, I found a copy of Uchu Kyodai (by Chuya Koyama) in my local library, and started reading it recently. It's fun to compare the perspectives from more than a decade ago, to the actual development we have right now, regarding space exploration.
(This was posted to another thread, but I moved it here after I realized comments were moved)
It's not any more or less out of reach for a medium-sized corporation than it's been since the 70s. The reason no corporation has gone is that there's no economic incentives to. And there's still not; this is a NASA mission, it's exploratory science funded by the public.
How do you expect to get to the Moon before SpaceX? The Space Shuttle ended up costing $2+ billion per launch, and given it's a government program - getting anything on it from an untested company who didn't already have major connections would be near to a nonstarter, and that's even if they could casually foot the billions of dollars it would have cost.
FireFly launched as a private company on a Falcon 9 so their cost was probably a peak of ~$0.07 billion (to maintain units) which may have been able to be privately negotiate downward given the nature of the mission.
The space shuttle isn't relevant to this conversation. Private industry has been putting things in space for decades, long before SpaceX existed. The reason no private company put a thing on the moon isn't because they couldn't, it was because nobody was paying them to, and because there is not otherwise any economic benefit to them for doing so. If your expected income is zero, it doesn't matter how low your costs are.
I agree that Space Shuttle is not relevant (as a peer poster mentioned it simply lacks the delta v to even get to the Moon), but do not agree that this capability has readily existed for decades. You needed (1) private industry (2) affordable (3) moon capable and (4) civilian availability. We were failing on various points at various times, but now a days none of those really pose an issue anymore.
Now that we've clearly nailed all 4 of those points, we're starting to see lots more interesting things in space from tourists visiting the ISS, people sending their ashes to space, to doing private space walks and going further into space than any human has since the 70s [1], and now even things like this with a private company landing a payload on the Moon. Many of these things are done with no return beyond doing them.
More specifically though, this is also literally why SpaceX was created. Elon was researching NASA's plans for getting men to Mars. They literally did not exist. He wanted to get society more interested in space and so his idea was to launch a greenhouse to Mars and live-stream it. The capability for that simply did not exist in America, and in Russia the costs were far too high. So SpaceX was born.
Smallest lunar lander so far is 200kg/440lbs, that's the weight of a carry on full of lead. Besides the Space Shuttle can't go higher or deliver higher than LEO anyway.
That's not an answer as we're looking for choices available from "the 70s" to before SpaceX so let's say around 2000. This issue is literally why SpaceX was started. Elon looked into NASA's plans for sending humans to Mars, saw they didn't exist and wanted to get the public more excited in space. His idea was to use his money to fund the launch of a greenhouse to Mars, which would be live streamed. No company in America was willing/able to do this, and in Russia the costs were far too high. So SpaceX was born.
You're right that Space Shuttle was a nonstarter for technical reasons, but it doesn't change the core issue. Neither does the mass. Unless you can find other companies willing to share a launch with you, you're paying for a whole rocket. And that's if you can manage to contract a rocket in the first place. As an inconsequential nitpick, no lander weighs 200kg. You're conflating landing mass (of which there's been well smaller than 200kg) with total launched mass. Fuel, thrusters, and so on multiply the weight substantially.
Yeah that's true, but I haven't really experienced the Apollo era personally. After the "gap" between the old space race, and the new race inspired by private space agencies, I do feel we are getting closer, to the moon at least.
Something most people don't appreciate is that, outside of the distance, Mars is super easy mode compared to the Moon. The Moon has 2 week long nights cycling between highs and lows in the range of -130C to +120C, inhospitable terrain, constantly getting pounded by meteorites, no atmosphere whatsoever, much higher radiation, much less gravity, and so on. Mars, by contrast, is oddly similar to Earth - similar day/night cycle, even a similar axial tilt meaning similar seasonal cycles, relatively reasonable temperature ranges, some atmosphere, and more.
This is why the image of the Moon as a stepping stone to Mars doesn't really make any sense. The Moon is very much 'hard mode', but it's closer. So the main tech issue to make up (long distance travel) is not one that progress on the Moon will go much towards advancing.
Well, Mars is so much farther away and much more massive so you need a lot of fuel if you want to come back. This is much more difficult than the extra fuel needed for the moon landing due to lack of atmosphere. Speaking of which, Mars having an atmosphere means you need complex heat shields for the landing.
Furthermore it's so far that unlike the case of the moon you can't make real time adjustments from earth, there's a delay of several minutes. Then again you have dust storms...
Atmospheres make landing easier and require less fuel! A big problem with landing is losing your speed which is going to be extremely high to begin with. On the Moon you can only do this by basically turning around in the opposite direction of your velocity and thrusting an equal but opposite amount. It's not only quite complex but also substantially complicates landing.
This is made even true on the Moon because its low gravity means that even a hair of velocity is going to make you 'bounce' after landing. This is why things like probes and rovers landing (or at least ending up) on their side or even upside down on the Moon is a fairly frequent affair. On Mars (and other places with an atmosphere) you can use atmospheric braking which is essentially just slowing down by bumping into the atmosphere in a controlled fashion. You can even get things like parachutes involved in the process.
The dust storms in Mars are also 'fake' at least as presented in movies/books like "The Martian." Mars has an extremely low atmospheric pressure (relative to Earth) so fiercest dust storm imaginable would feel like nothing more than a slight breeze. The only issue they pose is visibility, and dust accumulating on solar panels. Andy Weir, by the way, was well aware of this when writing "The Martian" which is otherwise a phenomenally well researched hard sci-fi book. I think it's highly telling that he had to intentionally fudge reality to create a crisis on Mars!
I think the big piece that is being overlooked here is the distance. The distance itself poses significant challenges. The obvious things like resupply and communication are much harder. But also the journey to mars is much harder on the human body.
Rescue and abort options are also much harder. The moon is close enough to easily resupply or rescue people on the surface, mars is much harder.
Completely agreed. Distance will impose substantial challenges, but the good thing is that that's really the "only" big challenge there is. I think many people have this mental model where the Moon is easy and Mars is hard, perhaps because we've already set foot on the Moon and so clearly it can't be that bad.
But if somehow both of these bodies were orbiting around Earth, Mars would be just orders of magnitude more straight forward than Mars, and I think it's relatively likely we'd already have permanent outposts, if not colonies, there. So the mental model of it being viewed as a stepping stone is somewhat misleading. The Moon is hard!
And also I don't think the distance will be that bad. We've already had 374 day ISS stays which is far longer than any possible transit to Mars (though nowhere near as long as a late-stage mission abort would entail) and the overall effects of such a stay were not markedly different than significantly shorter stays on the ISS. So it seems very unlikely that even a late stage emergency abort would be fatal.
It would be very cool if we are able to properly colonize the moon in my lifetime. Even if we don't have humans living there like in Futurama (as cool as that would be), it would be unbelievably cool if we have constant back-and-forth trips to the moon.
As far as flights of fancy regarding the moon, I enjoyed Randall Munroe's "What if we put a pool on the moon" thought experiment. I would enjoy the experience of propelling myself out of the water like a dolphin!
There might be an exact location on one of the poles where the environmental controls don't require dealing with swings of -183C to 106C every 14 days.
Other radiation could be tolerated for short periods, mitigated by thick transparent domes with layers of water in between the layers?
There is no reason for humans to ever return to the moon. The cost and risks are not justified. Drones and robots can do anything that needs to be done. They don’t need to breathe, they don’t need to sleep, or eat.
I think it would be cool, and I don't know that I care if there's a "reason" to do it other than "human achievement".
I mean, there wasn't really a "reason" to go to the moon in the 60's either. I think I more or less agree with JFK on this:
"Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, 'Because it is there'. Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it"
I could try and find a lot of justifications about medical research or something, and those might be cool, but it would be dishonest if I pitched those as a "reason" to go, because I would want us to return even if those reasons weren't there.
If you haven’t heard it, Public Service Broadcasting used the JFK speech in their song “The Race for Space” from the album of the same name. If you’re even partially a space nerd, it’s worth a listen. Very inspirational and the final album track is relevant to todays news.
When Mallory climbed on Everest (and possibly summited) it was a big deal because it had never been done. When Hilary and Tenzing did it, it pushed human achievement forward.
Today people still do it, but it means nothing to anyone other than those people.
Going to the moon in the 60s was an impressive feat. It pushed the boundary forward. But that's all it did. There's literally nothing of value there.
Sure most of the people who saw that are dead, or will be in the next 20 years. So it will seem "cool" to the next generation. But selling "cool" to a congressional appropriations committee is a tough sell.
We aren't gonna colonize the moon (or indeed mars) because frankly it would be too expensive, and there's no point. There literally is nothing to gain from a colony in either place, and there's no way to fund it (and no reason to fund it.)
But you have to get a lot of other supplies to the moon to make use of that. Space travel will never be useful enough to pull that off. A self sustaining colony on mars is just barely possible (but I'm not sure if it is worth it), no place else in space will ever be colonized. The laws of physics are too harsh - only a "generation" ship could even leave our solar system (well you could put a child on something to leave and come back in old age without generations, but this would be pointless and unethical), and we have no reason to think those would last long enough to make the nearest star, much less one with habitable planets (which we might need to terraform).
The moon lacks too much to be self sustainable. Mars is a stretch: it is likely someone will reply that mars isn't possible and they will have good points, so while I have concluded it is just possible I can see the points of those who think it is not.
But if we are to go more interesting places... shouldn't we have down breathing, eating, and sleeping on the moon so well that it isn't much of a cost or a risk? It's inherently a good testing ground for things we need to do reliably much further later.
Imagine if we never built ISS because putting a space station in Earth's orbit was a solved problem...
I'm too tall and I don't have twenty PhDs so I don't think "astronaut" is really on the table for me, but I would absolutely go to the moon if I had the opportunity.
The dust would give me some anxiety too but I think it would be worth it.
Robotics is unfortunately not there yet, unless we plan to send everything there fully assembled with zero maintenance ever. Unless you mean purely for basic exploration.
Tell that to the people of deadliest catch and dirty jobs: we have robots now that can do everything we want to without needing to sleep or eat! Sadly, we're not using them because they don't exist yet...
As a factorio player, once they added remote operation of robots to the game, I never travel back to a planet after I've got it set up. If they made it so I could land a robot, I'd never go in the first place.
Those were direct results of "We just invented a hammer that is great at causing the apocalypse and are desperately looking for nails that don't cause the apocalypse."
Other options include but are not limited to: Digging massive rivers/canals. Digging a massive harbor. Digging a large hole. Digging through some mountains. Digging holes to store toxic waste.
What gets me is that the videos warp the perspective of the Earth in a way where it doesn't appear large anymore; and I wonder if that would happen with astronauts too.
They break through the atmosphere and then all of a sudden it looks like a small globe when the point-of-reference switches to the blackness of space.
The moon is a long way away. The furthest man has ever been from terra firma. The Earth is small at that distance compared to images from ISS or even a geosync satellite. The distance to the moon is about 30 Earths for perspective, over 400,000 kilometers away.
Different lenses would be the obvious answer. The lander's imagery looks like wide angle lenses while the Apollo image was taken by a human using a 250mm lens. If you watch the video in the link you'll see all of this info. It even shows a recreation of what it would look like to the astronauts which makes the earth look much smaller in the images
Offtopic, but what is up with YouTube's algorithm? Is it just me? When I scroll to see the next videos they are all very strange kids videos. Full of primary colors and super bizarre sequences. I was expecting to see more Firefly related videos.
One video is a kid flushing things down a toilet so an adult makes a cardboard toilet and picture cards they can put in. Next was a woman going into a theater and somebody put something in her backpack. Turns out it was a doll. Is anybody else seeing this stuff? What is it? Who's making it?
Don't click on weird stuff if you want to see less. Go in to your "My data in google" page and delete the weird stuff from your history and you should not see it so much. Also use the "not interested" feature in the video feed.
For those who don’t live in Texas, many people who live in Cedar Park would say they are from Austin. It’s a suburb to the North. I know an engineer from Firefly from years ago. She was always fascinating to talk to. I also sold my MK3s+ 3D printer to a firefly employee via Craigslist a few years ago.
Super cool. This is one of those things you watch and just "feels like the future". I know, we've been there before but it still feels like an awesome event.
(someone go back to Venus, I know it's hard, but someone please)
There have been plenty of pictures of older landing sites.
Most of those people have a part of their identity tied up in contrarian ideas, and would find a way to call it fake, even if you personally flew them up to the landing sites to have a look.
Rogan hasn't believed that for nearly a decade because he learned more about the physics of the Moon and the engineering of the time. Since you have an interest in truth and honesty, I'm sure now that you've been informed you won't spread this misinformation anymore and will do some reflection on how you ended up holding this view for so long past when it no longer was true.
Rogan has questioned the moon landing again just five months ago. Here is him having a conversation with Matt Walsh about it from episode 2204 of his podcast: https://youtu.be/xGoQcOIONVs?feature=shared
His wording is specifically "I think there is a less than zero chance that we did not go to the moon", i.e. he's not 100% sure but pretty sure we landed on the moon.
I think you are being quite generous to him here. He is not saying there is a non zero chance that it didn't happen similar to how there is a non zero chance your entire existence is the dream of a child who is about to wake up. He spends the next fourteen minutes weighing the supposed reasons for why it might have happened and why it might have not happened. Seven years ago he clearly stated that he believed in the moon landing. Here he is actually sowing doubts about the event.
Take it as you will. OP responded to another user saying maybe if there was fly-over video evidence it might convince someone like Rogan as clearly he is not entirely convinced yet. I think that's a fair assessment.
I am a fan of the LuGRE instrument from Italy. It's a sneaky little precursor to the ESA Lunar Pathfinder which will put a lunar communications system and positioning system into orbit. That will be able to use the LuGRE instrument to get it's own position fixed accurately and then it can start providing communications and positioning services to the surface. A few more satellites and the whole moon will be covered.
As a former Intuitive Machines employee, I feel obligated to correct the title! IM-1 landed on the moon last February and although it didn't stay upright, it was still operational and returned some decent scientific data.
(This comment was posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43235933, where the title was "Firefly Aerospace becomes first commercial company to successfully land on moon". We merged that thread hither.)
So... the mission literally went sideways? Yet, our indomitable heroes saved the day!
Jokes apart, I think anybody getting anything off the ground and out of the planetary gravity well are heroes. It's kind of wild how... mundane... rocketry has become. Between that and always-on nearly-free global video calling from a smart watch, I feel like I'm living in the future of some of the 1950s SciFi books I read as a kid.
"Kings of Space" by Capt. W. E. Johns comes to mind. The smell of that old paperback copy I have transports me to another time.
Congrats to the FireFly team, this is an amazing achievement.
Video of the earth rising from the horizon reminded me of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech.
Any opensource libraries in that satellite's tech stack will now get to brag about "our code running on the moon" :) I wonder if FireFly team has used AI coding tools in any part of their development process.
>About 14 days into the mission, Blue Ghost’s landing site will be plunged into lunar night. The lander will then need to rely on battery power as the company aims to keep it functioning in temperatures as cold as minus 250°F (minus 130°C).
Yes, but be patient, we're 1.24 light-seconds away (so lower bandwidth) and we have a lot of science to get done in the next 14 days, and that's the main objective of the NASA CLPS program.
I really like "Our Blue Ghost lunar lander now has a permanent home on the lunar surface..."
It's rare that usage of word "permanent" has this close to an accurate meaning. Complete development of the moon's surface aside, what are the factors what will destroy it? Solar and cosmic radiation? What timescale are we talking about here?
The're a surprisingly high flux of micrometeoroid impacts at the lunar surface. Most of these are too small to do much damage, but there will probably be measurable erosion in centuries and genuine damage within about 1 million years. The timeline for it to be destroyed/completely broken down is much longer.
For context, there's roughly a 50% chance of an astronaut being hit by a micrometeoroid large enough to kill them every 1.3 million years of time spent on the moon's surface. There's roughly a 50% chance of a square meter of the moon being hit by a micrometeoroid equavalent to 3 kg on TNT in a billion years.
Thank you for seeing through my sloppy writing, and identifying what I was getting at. I should have have said "aside from human intervention."
So, aside from the human intervention, and assuming that the materials can generally withstand radiation... let's say it's 6 sq meters, [0] I know this is not exactly how it works, but if LLMs[1] and my own lacking skills at mathematics are accurate, then ~70 million years? That sounds so much more "permanent" than anything on Earth.
Water in concert with temperature flux is really destructive causing a massive amount of erosion here on Earth.
With that said thermal cycles on the moon are very large, with a range up to 450F. That much thermal expansion and contraction over time is going to be hard on anything not shielded under some soil.
>Aluminum does not have a distinct fatigue or endurance limit, so its S-N graph curves down from the upper left to the right and continues to curve down lower and lower toward the lower right corner of the graph. This illustrates that it will eventually fail even from low stress applications, given enough of them.
Steel/titanium, if its fatigue tolerance is in the temperature range, would last much longer if not near indefinably until it came to impacts.
Overwhelmingly likely to be human interference, even without "complete development of the moon's surface".
Perhaps somebody thinks it would make a good museum piece back on Earth, or some bored spacefaring teen vandals destroy it for the lulz, or religious norms will change and those in power will blow it up to show their rejection of idols of a now forbidden age.
One person's rubbish is another's priceless artefact.
Landed craft on the moon often carry reflectors that help laser location of the Moon.
Spacecraft that have spent decades the Moon's surface are also going to give valuable clues about the behavior of their materials in these conditions, if / when someone collects and inspects them. Could save quite a bit of uncertainty for a larger project on the Moon.
Also, isn't basically everything you see on the moon some kind of debris? There are no apparent structures there created by complex, interesting processes, such as life, or by interesting geological processes. The spacecraft would be an aesthetical center of the area :)
This is great. And it’s sad to think this, but given current trends at the federal level and a competitor with influence, is there risk for the company and financing/operational options?
IMHO it would be more Yes, in the same sense that mount Everest is covered with all the garbage all the tourists can't be bothered to bring back from their (ego) trip.
On another note, I'm currently reading "Sunburst and Luminary An Apollo Memoir" from Don Eyles, which is a great read that makes you realize the feat it really was at the time.
My main interrogation now (and I've not yet looked anywhere for elements of answer) is why is it so difficult to reproduce with the current tech and scientfic advances ? Is bloatware involved or is the scope really different ?
Even when the moon is finally settled on, I guarantee you that nobody will make any effort to clean it up and throw it away.
It is truely sad that we can be sure that even thousands of years in the future, despite millions of humans looking at it every day, people will rather put a glass box around it, so nobody is bothered by it, than just tossing it into the lunar landfill.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/albums/7217772031...
There's also a cool lunar flyover video taken during final deorbit.