Once upon a time a bunch of nerds failed 3 times in a row while launching small rockets from an atoll. Some 20 years later they are now 13k+ nerds, they're launching every other day, land their boosters and are slowly becoming an ISP with a rocket launching side business.
Space is hard. There's nothing "embarrassing" in controlled landing on the freakin Moon with a shoestring budget, even if the landers fell over. Reddit's r/technology is leaking in this thread.
> Once upon a time a bunch of nerds failed 3 times in a row while launching small rockets from an atoll
Once upon a time most planes crashed. Then the state of the art advanced.
If IM can’t publish a convincing root-cause analysis for why their landers keep tipping over while their competitors’ don’t, they shouldn’t get new contracts and existing ones should be revisited.
1) private companies landing on the moon is a brand new thing in a very difficult technology. If we want to encourage it, maybe we should minimize risk.
2) what were their mission goals? Maybe it was just to stick the landing, test landing gear, etc. (There is a bunch of equipment on there for other things, so they must have had some other plans.)
3) what is the difference between a private company and NASA doing it? That is, why is it so hard to do what NASA did over 50 years ago, without things falling over, etc.? Is it budget? Time for testing and retesting (investors want returns)? Talent? Is NASA witholding its secret ingredients like a self-centered chef? (At least some national space agencies also have had problems, like JAXA, but I'm not sure how widespread that is.)
Edit: I would make it competitive, though. That's the point of private business - it can fail and disappear. Compete for the next contract.
We are definitely closer to the biplanes era of landing on the moon than we are to the Concorde era, as far as technological readiness goes. The pace of moon landers created has been much slower than the pace of airplanes built was in the early days.
Yup. The most fun fact about early aviation I heard that highlights how fast and loose everything was is that General Henry Harley Arnold in charge of the US Army Air Force during World War II learned to fly from the Wright brothers.
Not sure who you are quoting here, I never said "embarrassing". I'm sure that those "nerds" made adjustments based on the failures. That's all I was asking for.
Space is hard. There's nothing "embarrassing" in controlled landing on the freakin Moon with a shoestring budget, even if the landers fell over. Reddit's r/technology is leaking in this thread.