Posted on 02/26/2024 5:54:23 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Intuitive Machines have successfully soft landed on the Moon, carrying a number of payloads for NASA, this represents a return to the moon for the USA. However far more significantly, it's the first purely commercial lander to land on the surface of the moon, and the first lunar lander to use purely cryogenic propellents for all its deep space maneuvering. Both of these factors are core to NASA's Artemis program, and so seeing success here is important to NASA's plans.
However.
It's far from a perfect success, because it appears to have fallen over during the landing, and this is limiting the communications with the Earth, it's not clear how much science will be possible with the lunar surface payloads, but at least 3 of the payloads already contributed directly to the success of the landing.Why NASA's First Landing On The Moon in 50 Years Matters - It's Commercial, Cryogenic & Confused | 18:05
Scott Manley | 1.66M subscribers | 768,620 views | February 24, 2024
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
If you need further proof what he thinks of conservatives, he recently shared this one on Twitter/X:
When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, as they were entering or exiting the lunar module, one of the astronauts broke off the toggle on the switch that fired the engines. When it was discovered, since they were live to the world the phrase “my watch stopped” was to be used as to not alarm the world. They discovered that there was enough of the guts of the switch left that they could turn it on and off using a ballpoint pen.
The switch panel was moved away from the door on Apollo 12 and later missions.
His politics are ignorant, that’s all. He’s put gratuitous abuse in his YT vids as well, to the point that I ignored his ass for long periods of time.
Give ‘em enough time and enough money, and engineers can eventually overcome their biases and age-old educational misconceptions and learn from failure that they’d been wrong about those.
Yeah, Armstrong didn’t like the look of the landing site when it got close enough to notice details, and used some of the downward thrust to push the LM to a smooth area, landing with less than 30 seconds (some sources say 10 seconds) of fuel. AI and/or time-delayed Earthbound piloting aren’t (yet) up to the task.
They faked the 60s moon landing a whole lot better than this one. This one looks comically bad.
Interestingly enough I viewed a YouTube conspiracy theory vid just a day or two ago talking about Buzz Aldrin’s deathbed confession... 25 minutes of blather.
Buzz turned 94 on January 20th. He is doing fine as if this writing.
Buzz proved that radiation makes you live longer.
Lol.
"Do we have enough black women mathematicians? Are there enough homosexuals testing critical components? Are there too many Asians working out logistics? How much will the impact of the launch effect the surrounding weeds and insects?"
They've been wasting millions of our dollars agonizing over that sort of crap for decades, hindering the progress a few hundred chain-smoking white nerds accomplished with slide rules and less computer power than today's average cell phone.
So I consider anyone getting off this rock with bureaucracy being more of an obstacle than breaking the orbital plane heroic.
He probably came to that conclusion after reading a FR APOD thread which usually turns into humorless jokes and potty talk...
That is true. They went for simplicity. No fuel pumps or anything, two different components under pressure- hydrazine, and nitrogen tetroxide. When they mix they burn. No spark plug needed or ignitors. And it had to be throttle-able, supposedly the hardest nut to crack.
Problem is the stuff was so toxic and corrosive the engine had to be disassembled after firing. So while it was “tested” as a design, there was no way to test it again before launch. It had to work on the Moon for sure.
They kept having to shave pounds on the LEM during design so eventually made the pressure vessel itself out of thin aluminum out of acid etching or something like that. It had reinforced ribs but it was about as thick as a modern aluminum pop can in places, they could hear it making clinking or “oilcanning” noises when shut down and trying to rest on the Moon. They had to be mindful not to poke holes in the skin.of the spacecraft.
No, if you want to read some wacky stuff Gordon Cooper is your huckleberry. He was selling those phony gas mileage extenders in the back of magazine advertisements. The FTC or somebody shut that down.
You'll find a bunch of usernames on this forum promoting the belief that the Apollo program was fake.
There’s a lot of it out there. A guy I know is in the space program was faked, world is flat realm now. Has a STEM degree from a top flight university.
I think it’s because people who get beyond the mainstream media narrative in the political realm, as any conservative must, realize we’ve been lied to about so much for so many decades, that this stuff becomes believable for some.
Thank you for that. I think I have seen it somewhere, long ago.
It is interesting, and perhaps telling, that in that footage the lander, too, appeared stable until just before touchdown. Once control was lost, it could never be regained. Some of that might have been Armstrong, some the machine.
Neil Armstrong was also the first, I believe, to dock with an Agena in orbit during Gemini. Here, a thrust valve stuck open on the capsule and resulted in horrific rates of spin. I forget how he got out of it.
Armstrong was, therefore, a good choice for the Moon landing. He had proven himself in emergency situations numerous times.
I note, that as far as these Moon landers go, there is, perhaps, a reference that can be made to Elon Musk’s Space-X booster landings. These land on a moving sea platform fully automated and quite impressively. They use controls at the TOP of the booster for stability in landing - giving them excellent control of the vertical angle of the tall booster. Because these boosters land on Earth, the controls are aerodynamic fins. There is no reason that they could not be thrusters for the airless Moon.
A final note is that two Viking probes landed on Mars, fully automated. Mars has a small amount of atmosphere, and the probes were probably designed using people and systems with knowledge of the Apollo LEM. Both landings “worked” - which means they were upright.
Yeah. The same extras disk has Dave Scott’s account of that docking malfunction. As he put it, as the spin rate approached blackout, Neil was selecting the right switches and got the whole thing stopped, and finished with “That’s why you put Armstrong in charge.”
Granted I was just a kid, but when the names of the Apollo 11 astronauts were announced, I (and I’m sure a lot of people) said, “who?” But everyone who flew aircraft knew who he was :^)
It wasn’t luck that created that generation.
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/neil-armstrong-and-x-15
Why did they make it so top heavy??This thing should have been wider than it was tall (low center of gravity)
We have no idea how top heavy it is, it’s just tall-lookin’. It’s not likely that the center of gravity was ignored.
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