Hopefully someone at Intuitive Machines pores over the data and and design plans and makes significant changes that minimize the opportunity for this to happen the third time around, assuming NASA gives them that opportunity.
If their lander is indeed top-heavy then they have some design issues to overcome. Perhaps adding a set of outriggers that deploy just before touchdown and detach or fold up on command once the lander is deemed to be in a stable orientation. Even landing it as a ball with air cushions that deflate once it comes to rest has to be preferred to simply keeping it the same and hoping for a nice flat spot to land.
> pores over the data and and design plans and makes significant changes
And then publishes it. The fact that they have precise renders still published of their next lander [1] is a bit telling about their engineering approach.
That's pretty funny. Doubling down on it may not pay off.
The first two landers have different backgrounds. The third and fourth re-use the first lander background in the same orientation and mirrored. I would think that since the third lander has a model displayed and the fourth is just a proposed outline that they may be open to structural changes by the fourth if they get that opportunity.
Hopefully they take the bait and pursue modifications that give their lander a lower center of gravity or a wider footprint. If I were at NASA I would be hesitant about allowing them to launch that third model with no mods. Even if all they do is hit the free section on craigslist in Houston and grab all the free-weights and a lightly used tarp to swing, testicle-style, underneath the lander as it tries to find the moon.
The first one tipped over because a sensor failed. I suppose we don't know why this one did yet but why do these sorts of failures bring out the caveman in everybody suggesting completely giving up on the whole concept and doing something "dumb" that doesn't require control systems? Just because control systems feel scary and you might not personally know how to design them yourself doesn't mean they aren't great when they work. Falcon 9 lands upright pretty reliably but even in the early days of that when it wasn't working, people were saying they should give up and use a giant net or towers or something for it to dumbly fall into. It's like seeing a car crash and saying "Why don't we just have giant balloons around cars to absorb the impact when they crash or guide rails along the roads so they won't go off course if the driver falls asleep?". Yea we could but it's both cheaper and possible to do it smarter.
If you were writing software and it had a bug, you wouldn't throw out the whole thing and replace it with a spreadsheet, you'd fix the bug.
> I suppose we don't know why this one did yet but why do these sorts of failures bring out the caveman in everybody suggesting completely giving up on the whole concept and doing something "dumb" that doesn't require control systems? Just because control systems feel scary and you might not personally know how to design them yourself doesn't mean they aren't great when they work.
Because $150M was/is at stake and "bouncy ball that rolls to a stop and then unfurls" has been proven repeatedly to work?
Legged landers have also been proven to work on the moon many times. I suspect the reason for this thinking is that engineers like to find technical solutions to problems but when the only information you have is "it fell over", the only apparent technical solutions are to use different concepts that can't fall over. Once you know more specifics of why it failed, you'd be thinking of ways to prevent those, like maybe correct the software bug or implement redundant sensors or whatever. The troubles with these landers won't be something as difficult as "Reliably balancing a slender object upright is beyond the cutting edge of technology" since that problem has been thoroughly solved in other contexts like Falcon 9 and Segway.
Go home lunar probe! You're drunk. ( I am kidding ).
More seriously outside the box. This one is going to scratch my head for a couple of days. It's gonna fall - make use of that fall. Not useful if you need light for solar panels and you are stuck in a crater.
Hopefully they go out of business for having ignored the advice of the entire scientific community simply because they wanted to pull some SpaceX-type-shit on the Moon and ended up costing everyone over a hundred million dollars and probably a setback of years, all because of their CEO's ego.
As much as I do not want to believe this, it sounds like the horrid truth. Feynman did it his way and furthered the science. Randolf of blacklite power was a shister.
If their lander is indeed top-heavy then they have some design issues to overcome. Perhaps adding a set of outriggers that deploy just before touchdown and detach or fold up on command once the lander is deemed to be in a stable orientation. Even landing it as a ball with air cushions that deflate once it comes to rest has to be preferred to simply keeping it the same and hoping for a nice flat spot to land.