[Julesman]

Radical suggestion. Don't make your lander taller than wide. I'm the first to assume that the science nerds have thought of everything and that my uneducated self has nothing to say about it. But then I saw the lander. It looks very tippable.

So then here's my luddite take. Can't they just unfurl wider stabilizers from the legs that increase their footprint? At slow speeds in low gravity it seems like they wouldn't need to be heavy or strong.

[stavros]

In general, when it seems to my uneducated opinion that a bunch of experts have missed something obvious to me, it's almost always the case that the one who has missed something is me.

[foobarian]

I feel exactly the same and this is the reason why I would absolutely love to read an expert article titled "Why super-wide Moon landing gear is not a good idea"

[tekla]

It needs to fit into a fairing. Otherwise you need to build a deployment mechanism.

[anigbrowl]

If there isn't an obvious answer to the obvious question, then it's up to the experts to communicate that information more effectively.

[stavros]

The experts' job is to land on the moon, not to teach you.

[anigbrowl]

Don't sulk. Communicating with the public is a necessary aspect of publicly funded science.

[db48x]

Stabilizers are made of matter, and matter has mass. Lifting mass off of the Earth and on to the Moon takes fuel. Fuel is made of matter too, and has mass. Lifting the fuel to lift the fuel to lift the mass is expensive.

So much cheaper just to have an altimeter and no extra stabilizers. Sadly, their altimeter didn’t work. They forgot to turn it on correctly.

Honestly, they’re lucky that it got so close to landing correctly; if it had been going faster the damage would have been even worse than just a crumpled landing leg.

[wolfendin]

If you have legs that unfurl, now you have minimum three more more systems that fail and cause the same problem