The craft that tipped over last year (Odysseus) was also made by Intuitive Machines (IM).
Firefly's Blue Ghost landed on the moon last week without tipping over, proving that a modern commercial company can do it.
Kind of embarrassing for IM which is 0 for 2. I'm sure there are all kinds of reasons/excuses for why IM's landers fell over and I'm sure their mission profiles are different from Firefly's, but from a high level perspective I'm sure senior leaders at NASA are reconsidering giving any new contracts to IM.
Yeah, was cool to see Blue Ghost be successful. And do the point about tall and thin, the Blue Ghost lander is much more squat than the Intuitive Machines landers
That’s a proximate-cause analysis. If the root of their problem is a rangefinder, what happened that caused them to consistently miss with it?
The lack of credible comments strikes me as someone socking the answer: they’ve committed to a stacked format that is inherently unstable. If they can’t get an answer out before the next budget is passed, their contracts should be cancelled.
> I'm sure senior leaders at NASA are reconsidering giving any new contracts to IM.
at NASA, and DOGE, when they catch wind of it
bagholders on reddit trying to understand the 50% drop have not been open to anything rational that explains the 50% drop
so far I've gotten "You are blinded by dumb hate." for pointing out that $LUNR's unintuitive machines getting contracts from Nasa are their only business plan, as if this is a partisan thing
Shit, NASA does space stuff, it fails sometimes! Do we want to only fund things we know to be 100% easy to do? And don't fucking tell me, "we already landed on the moon once, how hard can it be?" because this shit is really fucking hard and takes lots of cash and a lot of what apppears to be "waste" or "failure" on a first order approximation, but in reality is actually "learned knowledge".
I can't believe people think they're going to "make america great again" by cutting funding for all the stuff that makes America an economic, cultural, and academic powerhouse.
Worse, it’s richest country on earth complaining about being too poor and having to enact austerity measures — implemented by the richest person on the planet who’s personal pay is much, much higher than any of the savings he’s found so far.
I’ve seen many occasions in my career when some manager had flown across the country with a business class ticket, stayed in a fancy hotel, rented a luxury car, and turned up to an all-hands-on-deck meeting to announce in a grave tone that the minimum wage workers are just going to have to make some sacrifices.
This is almost precisely what’s going on with DOGE except you can substitute private jet and secret service motorcade. And instead of minimum wage, it’s…
less than minimum wage.
The richest are complaining about being too poor to help the needy, and fixing the issue by cutting every program that helps those under the poverty line.
This doesn't seem a fair analogy. Elon Musk is not being paid by the government, as I understand.
The reason the manager flying around spending money to attend a downsizing meeting is gross is that the manager is spending company money (that could go to prevent downsizing).
To complete the analogy, you would need to be implying that Elon's personal money should be paid to fund federal services.
> you would need to be implying that Elon's personal money should be paid to fund federal services.
I am. These payments are called taxes.
Taxes he's successfully evaded paying using the the same tricks as every other billionaire, such as taking out loans against his shares that will be repaid after his death by his estate, which has negligible tax rates compared to the kind of income taxes paid by mere mortals.
All joking aside, if Elon -- just him, no other billionaire -- had simply paid the same marginal tax rates as any random upper-middle-class citizen, it would be 10x the amount DOGE had cut so far from the federal budget.
I totally agree with the space is hard, it fails sometimes. I been in the space industry on both the super rigorous high cost, high mission assurance side of things and the low cost commercial launch 10 and hopefully most of them work side of things. The lunar lander is an ambitious first project and two failures in a row is real rough, but definitely happens the space industry in new ventures. I'm sure there are great engineers there and what they are doing is tough.
But...specifically on funding for Intuitive Machines I don't understand how NASA also gave then an IDIQ contract for up to $4.8 billion for lunar communications and PNT services [0] based on the experience of one lunar lander that didn't actually work.
They shouldn't just cancel, but with the same kind of failure twice in a row it seems they should require correcting the tipping-over issue before trying a third time.
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.
I don’t make comments based on what I want to happen
An entire federal agency was deleted and thousands of non profits and other organizations were using the funding source as their only client and are also deleted now
Just because this one is publicly traded we should expect a different outcome?
I love prediction markets because now there is another outlet for perceiving politics than just debating. I take your money in a zero sum game if my worldview is more accurate, love that. I would almost say it rewards having a contrarian view of the world, but there are some psychology studies that show even ideologues like you will make accurate predictions if there is a payout of basically any amount. So I doubt it’s actually a contrarian view given that you have the same information.
Thats an odd response to me, I had look up the definition of the word ideologue to see if it was unintentionally a pejorative, and it isn’t. You had an uncompromising viewpoint despite being based on the same information that I have. Shrug.
So what is your thought on the rest of the comment
Well, I have literally never seen someone use ideologue in a non-pejorative way, but here it is. Anyways, I would delete my previous comment, knowing you meant no offense, even if I don't think I am an ideologue, or that you could have possibly pinned me for one from my original comment (which IMO was pretty tame, I just really like what NASA does).
In any case, I don't know if IM needs to lose a contract or not, I should have been more specific and probably done more research, but I was more interested in NASA retaining funding for their missions, and if they think IM is a good company then by golly I'm not one to second guess rocket scientists.
Overall, I don't agree with the fact that any of the other stuff was cut the way it was. R's hold both legislative bodies, the executive branch, and the judicial branch (kinda). If they wanted to cut funding the proper way, with a budget and all that jazz about how a bill becomes a law, that's fine. However simply cutting the funding at the exec level with no regard for anything is fucking stupid and illegal.
As far as betting markets being accurate goes, I have no opinion or experience for that as I don't play those types of betting games. It could be very useful, but I don't really care if I am right or wrong overall, I will and do change my views if I am wrong (sidebar: would an ideologue do that I wonder?). I used to be a much different person, politically, and as I learn new things I change my view of the world over time. My bet with my worldviews is that I go out and do things that align with those views, the prize is that the things I do make a positive difference.
Firefly's Blue Ghost landed on the moon last week without tipping over, proving that a modern commercial company can do it.
Kind of embarrassing for IM which is 0 for 2. I'm sure there are all kinds of reasons/excuses for why IM's landers fell over and I'm sure their mission profiles are different from Firefly's, but from a high level perspective I'm sure senior leaders at NASA are reconsidering giving any new contracts to IM.