Sideways moon landing cuts mission short, private US lunar lander will stop working Tuesday

AP ^ | 02 26 2024 | MARCIA DUNN

[The Antiyuppie]

“AI controlled as opposed to Mission controlled - no human needed.”

It’s really surprising that, given the capability to simulate the landing against well-known types of moon terrain, gravity, celestial mechanics, the lander itself, etc., that this could happen.

[Jan_Sobieski]

True Engineering is 10 failures to every 1 success because ofMurphy’s Law. Unless you lunar land in a studio…

Afunny thing happened on the way to the moon…

[teeman8r]

i guess that’s why we don’t see any space aliens coming forward... every probe they sent topple over... all they see is gravity gone wrong with everything upside down and not falling up.

[SaxxonWoods]

Exactly. Remember the Vanguard! And a lot more:

List of spaceflight-related accidents and …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight...
As of March 2023, in-flight accidents have killed 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts in five separate incidents. [2] Three of the flights had flown above the Kármán line (edge of space), and one was intended to do so. In each of these accidents the entire crew was killed. See more

[SaxxonWoods]

“uh, it didn’t so much land on the lunar surface as much as crash landed... on its side.”

I thought I read that it touched down upright but fell over. I’m curious to hear more about any new details.

[NorthMountain]

Afunny thing happened on the way to the moon…

Yeah ...

We got there.

[Openurmind]

Probably a good thing it failed. They would have just used it to punish us here on Earth because of “lunar warming”.

They need to quit dumping money into these projects, they can’t even do them right.

[SaxxonWoods]

“it came in too fast last Thursday and the foot of one of its six legs caught on the surface, causing it to tumble over, according to company officials.”

Oops, I should have read the comments first.

[roadcat]

That’s what they get for not hiring Elon.

They should have hired a child. The kid would recommend designing the craft to operate while on its side, any side. Problem solved.

[GreenHornet]

Maybe this is the moon people’s version of cow tipping.

[Steely Tom]

Bummer, I know one of the lead engineers and designers (and one of the founders of Intuitive Systems). Its a success and a disappointment. Space continues to be ‘hard’. Countless things can go wrong.

The Atlantic Ocean was 'hard,' once upon a time.

[V_TWIN]

Anybody that watches BattleBots knows most of the bots contain an onboard mechanism of some sort that will right it in the event it gets flipped upside down.

[roving]

The whole thing looks fake.

[montag813]

Its design was always too top heavy and too tall. My engineer son mentioned this weeks ago prior to launch. Literally said “looks wobbly like a painters scaffold”

[mo]

if ya have never built a go-kart...ya know NOTHING about center-of-gravity issues...

[Libloather]

Cash for clunkers?

[frank ballenger]

They wanted to use “there are a lot of ways of this going sideways” in a sentence.