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 ...
Transcript 0:04 · hello it's Scott Manley here it has been 0:06 · an extraordinarily exciting and uh 0:09 · confusing last few days for fans of 0:11 · spaceflight as we watched the 0:13 · culmination of the im1 mission from 0:17 · intuitive machines carrying the space 0:19 · probe adicus to the lunar surface it 0:22 · launched just over a week ago on a 0:24 · falcon 9 a commercial rocket right and 0:27 · it's important to note that this is a 0:29 · commercial lunar Mission uh intuitive 0:31 · machines is a private company they did a 0:33 · lot of the development on their own 0:35 · albeit with some occasional NASA funding 0:38 · this Mission the anchor customer was 0:40 · NASA who spent on something like $120 0:44 · million for their payloads to go on this 0:47 · spacecraft to the moon but they were not 0:49 · by any means the only customers on this 0:52 · Mission as it happens this was the 0:54 · second mission of the Year following 0:56 · this uh commercial model from NASA the 0:58 · first being astrobotics paragr Lander 1:01 · which launched on the first Vulcan 1:02 · rocket and then promptly overpressured 1:05 · its propellant tanks due to a valve 1:06 · malfunction swung around the moon and 1:09 · then burned up in the atmosphere and to 1:11 · astrobotics credit while they didn't 1:13 · make it to the surface of the Moon they 1:14 · got a lot of love from the community 1:16 · because of their openness and they're 1:18 · willing to share details of spacecraft 1:21 · operations even after it was clear it 1:23 · was never going to make to the surface 1:25 · of the Moon but this meant that adicus 1:27 · had a chance to be the first American 1:29 · spacecraft to soft land on the surface 1:31 · of the Moon in 50 years NASA had of 1:35 · course got sidetracked by that whole 1:37 · Space Shuttle and space station thing 1:39 · they had launched a few really cool 1:41 · space probes around the moon but they 1:42 · hadn't bothered to land anything softly 1:45 · and this Lander in particular could 1:47 · trace its Heritage back over a decade to 1:50 · the Google lunar X prize some of the 1:52 · people who worked on it some of the 1:54 · hardware that was developed goes back to 1:57 · armadillo Aerospace which if you 1:59 · remember is on CarMax company he's the 2:01 · guy that created doom and then after 2:03 · making a ton of money off a quake 2:04 · decided that he wanted to get into 2:06 · rocketry and then lost it all and you 2:08 · know that's how these things go this is 2:10 · a video from armadillo's old YouTube 2:12 · page showing the test of a pressure-fed 2:15 · methane oxygen engine and that is hugely 2:19 · important because while people have been 2:21 · sending spacecraft to the moon for 60 2:23 · years nobody has tried to land a 2:26 · spacecraft on the moon using a cryogenic 2:29 · Eng Eng all the spacecraft have been 2:31 · using highly toxic hypergolic propellant 2:34 · which is great because you don't need an 2:36 · ignition system but it's not so good 2:38 · because it's just really nasty to work 2:41 · with so anyway this engine was developed 2:43 · for Project Morpheus which it actually 2:45 · began as Project M which was supposed to 2:47 · be like a NASA Skunk Works project to 2:50 · try and put a robonaut on the surface of 2:53 · the Moon after a couple of years that 2:54 · got split into two projects a sort of 2:56 · second generation robonaut which went to 2:58 · the space station and Project Morpheus 3:01 · which was this Lander That was supposed 3:03 · to demonstrate lunar Landing 3:05 · Technologies on Earth it was supposed to 3:07 · demonstrate new new sensor system 3:09 · onboard autonomous Hazard detection and 3:12 · avoidance and that's what this bit of 3:14 · Hardware is on the side here it's 3:16 · scanning The Landing site looking for 3:18 · those rocks and trying to figure out 3:20 · where the Lander can touch down again 3:22 · this was a small lowbudget technology 3:25 · demonstrator performed in collaboration 3:28 · with a commercial organization like 3:30 · armadillo and a number of the people 3:31 · that worked on this would go on to be 3:34 · part of intuitive machines to develop 3:36 · their Lander so with that in mind we had 3:39 · been following this mission for the last 3:40 · week or so and where they quickly 3:42 · established Communications and 3:44 · demonstrated the ability to ignite and 3:46 · operate their methane engine in deep 3:48 · space and this was a first while we have 3:50 · had a Chinese rocket that successfully 3:53 · launched to orbit using meth methyl o it 3:56 · didn't actually ignite its engine until 3:58 · it was outside the at so technically 4:00 · this was a win and then just in case 4:02 · there was any doubters out there I 4:04 · believe they ignited their engine 4:07 · further from the earth than anyone had 4:09 · ever ignited a cryogenic engine so they 4:11 · were absolutely cementing their place in 4:14 · uh you know the record books as true 4:16 · space innovators going out there with 4:19 · those engines that don't have the 4:21 · hypergolic propellants and that's 4:23 · something that NASA is absolutely 4:25 · relying on for its lunar lander both of 4:28 · the spacecraft that being chosen for the 4:30 · human Landing system are going to use 4:32 · cryogenic propellants uh starship's 4:34 · obviously going to use methane and blue 4:37 · origin spacecraft is going to use hydr 4:39 · loocks both of them are going to have to 4:41 · maintain cryogenic propellant in flight 4:44 · on orbit for a long period of time and 4:47 · this is something that was actually 4:48 · previously demonstrated I think on a 4:51 · mission to the space station they had a 4:53 · module which was fixed to the side and 4:54 · it basically kept some cryogenic 4:56 · propellant cooled using a cryocooler and 5:00 · passive Cooling and control systems for 5:02 · a long time so this was something of a 5:04 · Next Step where they were able to 5:05 · actually use the engine for all their 5:08 · operations in space and maybe one day we 5:10 · can abandon these hypergolic after all 5:12 · they're expensive they're toxic and of 5:15 · course methane and oxygen are pretty 5:17 · easy to produce uh in situ across the 5:20 · solar system on Wednesday the spacecraft 5:22 · successfully entered orbit and on 5:24 · Thursday we were watching a live stream 5:27 · of it descending and this can animation 5:30 · from a year ago is vastly more 5:33 · interesting than what the live stream 5:34 · brought us I mean we didn't have any 5:36 · live camera views which is 5:38 · understandable given bandwidth 5:39 · constraints but we didn't have any 5:41 · Telemetry and we certainly didn't have 5:43 · any animation that was being created 5:45 · from that Telemetry we had a bunch of 5:46 · Talking Heads and a clock counting down 5:50 · and to be honest the best part was when 5:52 · we would actually get live audio from 5:54 · the control room and all this sort of 5:56 · glossed over the fact that there had 5:58 · been some serious drama behind the 6:00 · scenes some top tier you know problem 6:04 · solving troubleshooting had been carried 6:06 · out to make this Landing get as far as 6:08 · it did originally we were told it was 6:10 · supposed to land around 6:12 · 426 and I joke that by the way that 6:15 · meant that the engine would be blazing 6:17 · at 420 yeah uh but they delayed it by 6:20 · two hours they delayed it by one orbit 6:22 · why well uh apparently they discovered 6:25 · that somebody had left a safety feature 6:28 · enabled on The Landing laser Guidance 6:31 · the lar system right so obviously when 6:34 · you're working with us on the ground you 6:35 · have safety features so that you don't 6:37 · blind people there was a manual 6:40 · interlock who would stop this activating 6:42 · and somebody had forgotten to you know 6:45 · take this out and so they didn't know 6:47 · until they got to lunar orbit and they 6:49 · tried to turn it on that their liar 6:51 · wouldn't work and guess what it was a 6:54 · complete fluke that this they actually 6:57 · turned this on early so the spacecraft 6:59 · had entered orbit slightly differently 7:02 · than they'd expected and was slightly 7:03 · closer to the Moon than they expected 7:05 · and so they were trying to quantify this 7:07 · perform a maneuver to bring it to a an 7:10 · orbit they were comfortable so they 7:11 · turned on the liar early and eventually 7:14 · figured out that it didn't work and this 7:16 · was really lucky because normally they 7:19 · would only turn this on during the final 7:21 · minutes of descent so landing on the 7:24 · moon required the ability to precisely 7:26 · measure the distance to the surface on 7:28 · previous missions you know going back to 7:30 · the' 60s we've had radar we've had 7:32 · people looking out with their eyeballs 7:34 · and of course the lunar Landers the 7:36 · Apollo Landers they actually had a big 7:38 · stick a contact probe that would uh turn 7:42 · on a light when they were close to the 7:43 · surface you know when it touched the 7:45 · surface but modern spacecraft they like 7:47 · to use liar the reason is that uh using 7:50 · a laser it's much more Compact and 7:52 · because the beam is so narrow you can 7:54 · actually get good measurements at much 7:57 · greater distances than using a radar 7:59 · radar system now for getting into lunar 8:02 · orbit and navigating in lunar orbit you 8:04 · can use radio ranging with the various 8:06 · onboard transmitters and there was 8:09 · actually a payload called ln1 the lunar 8:11 · node one navigation demonstrator which 8:13 · was a small like cubat piece of Hardware 8:16 · stuck on the side it was built at the 8:18 · Marshall space flight center and so 8:20 · while they were in lunar orbit they 8:22 · actually tested this payload and used it 8:24 · with groundbased measurements to 8:26 · actually verify that they were in the 8:27 · correct orbit so this knew where they 8:29 · were with pretty good precision and they 8:32 · could extrapolate that position forward 8:34 · and when they were firing the engines 8:36 · they could use the onboard inertial 8:38 · navigation system with accelerometers 8:40 · and gyroscopes to figure out where they 8:43 · should be but the problem is then you're 8:45 · ex you're integrating this forward that 8:47 · means you're taking the solution and 8:48 · stepping It Forward slowly in time and 8:50 · each step has an error in uh the 8:54 · velocity and the position so you could 8:58 · descend towards the surface surface 8:59 · using this but the errors would grow and 9:01 · grow and by the time you got to the 9:02 · surface you could be going too fast you 9:05 · could be going too slow you could be in 9:07 · the wrong place and getting a touchdown 9:09 · on the surface would be highly unlikely 9:12 · and the orbital navigation Hardware they 9:14 · use just wouldn't be useful on the time 9:16 · scale that was needed to land on the 9:19 · surface and so with this in mind it was 9:22 · extraordinarily fortuitous of them that 9:24 · they had another payload called ndl the 9:27 · navigation Doppler lidar for precise 9:30 · velocity and range sensing and this is a 9:33 · another liar system that was developed 9:35 · by Langley research to do basically the 9:38 · same thing the onboard liar was supposed 9:40 · to do they just needed to figure out how 9:43 · it could talk to The Landing software 9:45 · and provide the exact updates to make 9:47 · sure they could use it during The 9:49 · Descent and they developed a patch for 9:51 · their software integrated with their 9:54 · computer and they committed to a landing 9:56 · in 2 hours and that is about the same 9:58 · amount of time that took to figure out 10:00 · the problem with the abort switch on 10:01 · Apollo 14 if you remember which is 10:03 · another amazing Hack That was performed 10:06 · on a computer so that a landing could be 10:08 · carried out so respect to everyone 10:11 · involved that made that happen um no 10:14 · respect to whoever put together this 10:16 · stream again because this simulation 10:17 · you'll notice is running in a loop and 10:20 · it's showing the spacecraft in an 10:22 · attitude which was absolutely in no way 10:24 · consistent with the physics of the 10:26 · situation I would rather have had the 10:28 · control room it had a lot more 10:30 · interesting stuff going on and you know 10:31 · if you looked really carefully I think 10:34 · there's actually something interesting 10:36 · going up on on in some of these displays 10:38 · this is what I wanted to see it looked 10:40 · like this was a report from the the ndl 10:42 · the the laser thing the hero of the hour 10:45 · if you will so this was just a tiny clue 10:48 · that things were actually progressing it 10:51 · would have been great to have this up on 10:52 · the full screen but apparently at some 10:55 · point they realized that this wasn't 10:57 · supposed to be visible and they cut it 10:58 · out 10:59 · and so yeah for us observers this was 11:01 · really kind of annoying but on the other 11:03 · hand it is well understood these are 11:05 · commercial organizations and they're 11:06 · under no compulsion to actually share 11:08 · any of this stuff with us so anyway the 11:11 · time ticks down and eventually we get to 11:13 · zero and suddenly contact is lost and 11:17 · we're not sure what happens there's a 11:19 · lot of anticipation a lot of question as 11:21 · to whether they are able to get carrier 11:23 · log we can hear over the comms they ask 11:26 · the controllers to look at their last up 11:29 · updated Telemetry you see if there's any 11:31 · clues as to what happens and one person 11:33 · comes back and said they noticed a a 11:35 · roll happening just before they lost 11:38 · contact and this is critical because the 11:41 · High Gain antenna is more or less in a 11:43 · fixed orientation on the side of the 11:45 · spacecraft it was designed to land in a 11:47 · certain place in a certain rotation so 11:50 · that the antenna would be pointed at 11:52 · Earth and so they could actually get the 11:54 · down link Happening Now within a few 11:56 · minutes they said they did have contact 11:58 · they had carrier lock from G hilly in 12:00 · the UK and they were getting some data 12:03 · back but the amateur radio people around 12:05 · the world could see that the data the 12:07 · signal strength wasn't what it should be 12:09 · it would be another 12 hours before we 12:11 · had any further confirmation from 12:13 · intuitive machines and they said that 12:14 · yes we are in fact communicating and 12:16 · commanding the payloads it is down 12:19 · safely and to find out more tune into 12:21 · our press conference with NASA at 5:00 12:23 · p.m. eastern time and that is a time 12:25 · which I was going to be on a plane and 12:26 · it turned out it was a plane without 12:28 · Wi-Fi also by the way 5:00 p.m. Eastern 12:31 · is after all the stock markets closed 12:33 · and uh intuitive machines is on the 12:35 · stock market so uh you can imagine what 12:38 · would happen to the share price after 12:39 · the uh well this was how they presented 12:42 · the orientation of their Lander yeah it 12:45 · turned out that initial claim that they 12:46 · were upright was in fact based on 12:48 · partial Telemetry that they hadn't got 12:50 · the full story and they were instead 12:52 · actually sitting on their side so that 12:54 · is not only the successful second 12:56 · successful lunar Landing this year but 12:58 · also the second one that fell over 13:00 · during the landing process and you know 13:02 · let's be clear as Kerbal Space Program 13:03 · players we've all been there according 13:06 · to the press conference it was heading 13:08 · down at 6 M hour it was going down range 13:11 · at 2 m hour and the quote from Mission 13:15 · Control that they observed an adverse 13:17 · yaw just as they were touching down says 13:19 · to me that one of the legs on the side 13:22 · dug in and that rotated the spacecraft 13:24 · and caused it to start tipping over it's 13:27 · important to realize that if you're 13:28 · Landing a spacecraft on the moon while 13:30 · the gravity is one sixth that of Earth 13:33 · the inertia of your spacecraft is 13:35 · exactly the same and your sort of tip 13:38 · over velocity the maximum speed at which 13:40 · you can be going laterally before it 13:41 · will upset H drops it actually drops as 13:44 · a square root so typically about 40% of 13:47 · what it would be on earth is sufficient 13:49 · to cause the spacecraft to roll over 13:51 · according to the press conference the 13:53 · spacecraft is lying on panel e which you 13:56 · know there's six sides of the spacecraft 13:57 · so that's panel number five I guess and 13:59 · that's the panel which contains an art 14:02 · piece it's a Jeff Coon's phases of the 14:05 · moon it's called uh it's like supposed 14:07 · to contain a bunch of moons in a cube 14:10 · and they're all slightly different and I 14:11 · guess there's like nfts and things like 14:13 · that Associated so I guess they actually 14:16 · get a bonus point because they are 14:18 · closer to the Moon than they would 14:19 · otherwise be although you might have to 14:21 · change your interpretation of the art 14:23 · now that it is on its side rather than 14:25 · vertical now one of the payloads I was 14:27 · really hoping to see data from right 14:29 · away was Eagle Cam and this is a camera 14:32 · which would be ejected from the side of 14:33 · the spacecraft and track the spacecraft 14:36 · as it's performing the final Landing so 14:37 · it would land on the surface and watch 14:39 · the Lander coming down and that would no 14:41 · doubt have provided some really cool 14:43 · Clues as to what in fact happened except 14:46 · that because of the changes to the uh 14:49 · liar system they inhibited the 14:51 · deployment of the camera and therefore 14:54 · they're trying to decide whether they 14:55 · can in fact deploy this camera in its 14:57 · current orientation just so to get like 15:00 · some third person views of the 15:01 · spacecraft and the other payload that I 15:03 · would really like to see the results of 15:05 · is scalps the stereo camera for lunar 15:09 · plume surface studies and this was a 15:11 · series of multiple cameras on the legs 15:14 · which would be pointed in towards where 15:16 · the rocket engine is hoping to see how 15:19 · the rocket interacts with the lunar 15:21 · surface and that was the idea is they 15:23 · want to figure out how plumes dig down 15:26 · into the lunar surface and whether 15:27 · there's things they can do to perhaps 15:29 · model this physics better and understand 15:31 · how say something like blue Origins 15:33 · Lander might work on the moon here's the 15:35 · thing we don't know how much bandwidth 15:38 · they're going to have to get data back 15:39 · in fact during the press conference it 15:41 · sounded like they were having problems 15:43 · switching over to a stable link to 15:45 · actually get any data down the 15:47 · spacecraft's autonomous systems are 15:49 · designed to switch between two antennas 15:51 · when it's getting poor signal quality so 15:53 · it's switching back and forth before 15:55 · they can get a connection established 15:57 · and fix this problem but assuming they 15:59 · fix this they will be doing most of the 16:01 · communications over low gain and Tennis 16:03 · which means less bandwidth and they are 16:05 · racing against lunar night which is 16:07 · going to come in about a week from now 16:10 · so there's likely to be some sort of 16:12 · triaging to do to decide which data to 16:14 · get down before the spacecraft goes 16:17 · quiet so while the mission is probably 16:19 · going to be considered a success by NASA 16:21 · it's not as successful as we'd like and 16:24 · in terms of communication I don't think 16:26 · they've been hugely successful and we're 16:28 · really asking a lot of questions and not 16:30 · getting answers and of course there are 16:31 · critics saying well there 50 years on 16:33 · from the Apollo program why can't we do 16:36 · so much better than we did back then 16:38 · well guess what this Mission has been 16:40 · made and performed with a budget that is 16:43 · 0.1% of the Apollo program if you 16:46 · compare it to the surveyor program that 16:47 · spent about $5 billion inflation 16:50 · adjusted and you know again this is 16:52 · vastly cheaper the previous missions 16:54 · have been sent to the Moon uh you we've 16:56 · got the lunar reconnaissance Orbiter 16:58 · which is about half a billion Seline 17:00 · about half a billion lady about 280 17:03 · million these are all much more 17:06 · expensive than each of these clips 17:08 · missions and so NASA is absolutely 17:10 · betting that while they expect some 17:13 · losses they are going to get much more 17:15 · value for money from these commercial 17:17 · organizations and by you know basically 17:20 · funding them they're going to build up 17:22 · an area of expertise in the commercial 17:24 · Market which will enable further Landers 17:26 · and bring the cost down that's what 17:28 · they're hoping and I fully believe 17:30 · that's what's going to happen we've 17:31 · already had two launches this year there 17:33 · are four other launches that are slated 17:36 · for this year alone and I expect 17:38 · failures but you know what quantity has 17:41 · a quality in and off itself I'm Scott 17:43 · Manley fly 17:45 · [Music] 17:50 · [Music] 17:57 · safe 18:04 · [Music]
"Miss Otis regrets..."
SUVs with a relatively high CoG tend to roll over.
A fairly well known artifact of very basic physics.
Forget the “Rocket Science” part....
The Potsdam Gravity Potato keyword, sorted and stuff:
Reentry vehicles for return to Earth could probably be powered by a magnetic rail mass driver, it has been discussed in the past.
https://search.brave.com/search?q=intuitive+machines+stock
https://www.google.com/search?q=intuitive+machines+stock
Why did they try to land when there were high winds that could topple it over? The moon weather forecast clearly called for gale force winds.
Imagine how funny it would be if we had never gone to the moon 50+ years ago and today Biden presided over such a historic event.”Come on man, I just took the the country to the moon, don’t ask me about Hunter and crack.”
So, both the Japanese and the American landers did the same thing.
In the days of Apollo, a platform called “the flying bedstead”, I believe, was used to simulate and gain understanding of the landing on the Moon. At 1 Earth Gravity, it was a very stripped-down set of mostly legs - hence the name. Neil Armstrong, I believe, had to punch out of one at near 90 degrees during testing.
Without knowing, I suppose I expect that these “landers” went through none of that. When something is barely able to land on the Moon, it is very hard to simulate on Earth, except fully inside a computer.
With both the Japanese and American landers failing, I would want to look at a sudden increase in thrust just before touchdown, as the engine nozzle gets back-pressure from the surface. But, whatever it is, it probably needs to be figured out at this end, first.
Space is hard.
It’s harder when you splash talk of success when you already knew it was a failure.
I don’t know how true it is, somebody was saying the proximate cause was a missed switch setting, a physical switch setting that was out; rendering the laser range finders inop. They would be disabled on the pad so it wouldn’t be energized at the wrong time, overheat, maybe blind people etc. So they had to send up a software patch to utilize a separate laser system intended for another application that was operating. like I mentioned I’ve no idea of the accuracy of that. But that might explain the extra hop around the bend.
Then it was not enough telemetry data to find a suitable landing location. Every Apollo landing, the computer was going to land them in a not quite good enough spot, or they were coming in too hot. So every lunar pilot elected to take manual control for the last several clicks down in altitude. A couple guys talked about letting the computer handle it for a 100% automated landing, which was theoretically possible, but nobody ever did. Imagine that.
The Neil Armstrong bailout is described by Alan Bean in the extras disk of some documentary I have around here, and it’s funny.
footage of the event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUJDbj9Vp5w
It never hit me until years later that while landing on the moon is dangerous enough, the return to the command module relies on one switch and the engine performing perfectly as designed and planned. If the switch was somehow inoperative or the engine start a bust, the team was stuck on the moon forever.
From my understanding NASA had very little to do with running this mission or designing the craft. This was a private Endeavor. So why does everyone keep talking about NASA?
Success of the landing???
The thing fell over and it’s shutting down [because the solar panels can’t charge, I think I read]
How is this in any way a success?
Well, they did hit the moon...so there’s that.
They probably used the NBC forecast, and everything out of NBC is a fabrication.
The company was the contractor, NASA funded the mission and told them where to, uh, put it.
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