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> Statistically, it has proven very hard to land on the Moon. Only about half of all attempts have succeeded. Why is this still the case given that NASA were a
by nanna 3y ago
> Statistically, it has proven very hard to land on the Moon. Only about half of all attempts have succeeded.
Why is this still the case given that NASA were able to land humans on the moon 55 years ago, not to mention do so in a way that could also bring them home?
- enlyth 3y agoI'm guessing having humans on board makes it easier, since they can tend to the landing instead of having to do it semi-autonomously all the way from Earth
- tempestn 3y agoThat does make the most sense. Given the technological gap over more than 50 years, that's the one advantage those missions had, and with 6 successful landings (and none of the failures being in the moon landing phase) it couldn't just be luck.
- dotnet00 3y agoTo an extent, given how crewed spaceflight safety standards have improved since then, it was a combination of luck and only doing it 6 times that no crew was lost on the Moon. Famously there were two versions of the president's speech prepared, one for the case that the astronauts would be unable to return.
- tempestn 3y agoYes, agreed that there was some luck involved, certainly. I'm just saying that there were enough successes that it's statistically significant that their results were better than more recent ones. And agreeing with the parent that the manned component is the best explanation for that.
- EliRivers 3y agoAs I recall, Armstrong chose the landing site personally, using the awesome power of looking out of the window and judging a good descent speed for touchdown. He avoided big rocks and craters.
- kitd 3y ago>80 years ago Either this is wrong or I'm doing great for 84
- nanna 3y agoI think you're doing better than me ;) Corrected.
- jansan 3y agoThis is really interesting. They had a team of incredibly smart people and it seems that humans on board can handle difficult situations better than a computer. Apollo 11 would probably have crashed without a highly trained human on board.
- pvaldes 3y agoEasily solvable in the design. Is a robot, it does not need a head and a tail, or to carry people that needs to have their heads up. Just remove the up and down constrains and make any part able to be the upper part, or design it as a tumbler doll.
- soco 3y agoAs a rule of thumb, solutions starting with "just..." get something wrong.
- pvaldes 3y agoAs a rule of thumb, nobody sane would propose to go to the moon. I would be very disappointed if this people would follow general rules instead to point to the excelence.
- dotnet00 3y agoThat's designing specifically for this failure case, when the typical case is that a sensor or engine encounters an overlooked edge case during the descent phase and smashes into the surface.
- pvaldes 3y agoIn such big projects as this, you just can't say "we didn't though about that, we will wait to see if we have luck". Having B-plans for each specific case that you could reasonable obtain is a must. They were paid big sweet money for thinking about that. The idea that the machine can be moved only if receives sun by some specific direction, is not logical when you play at this level.
- dotnet00 3y agoThis isn't a $20B project paid for by a corrupt government and poorly educated population like what NASA deals with, where indeed they cannot go without a measure for every contingency and without promising to burn billions of dollars buying votes, because otherwise they won't get funding at all. This had a total cost of $121M. Like any sane engineering project, it did accept some risk and chance of failure as part of the tradeoffs. Part of that was potentially landing in a bad orientation.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat never happened. 54 years. I should know, I watched it happen and I'm 58.
- DelTaco 3y agoWhat?
- lastofthemojito 3y agoHe's pedantically correcting the poster who said "NASA were able to land humans on the moon 55 years ago". The first moon landing was July 20, 1969, so 54 years and 193 days ago.
- z2h-a6n 3y agoTo be fair to jaquesm, it looks like nanna's comment used to say '80 years ago' and was edited, so the correction was more significant. See comment by kitd.
- wasmitnetzen 3y agoThat depends on how you're rounding. Human age is always rounded downwards, but with general timeranges, it differs. 193 days is 52.8% of a year (52.7% of a leap year), so you can round that to 55.
- jacquesm 3y agoIt said '80'.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hcrean 3y agoBudget is likely a large contributing factor.
- somenameforme 3y agoCommonly thought - as well as intuitive, but 100% untrue. The entire Apollo program, from start to finish, cost $178 billion (in 2022 dollars), over 11 years. [1] That's a bit more than $16 billion a year. NASA's budget has been greater than $16 billion/year (in 2022 dollars) every year since 1963. [2] And that was going from absolutely nothing - having never even put a man in orbit, to putting a man on the Moon, all in 8 years. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
- _y5hn 3y agoNever underestimate a good dick measuring contest.
- dotnet00 3y agoThat's comparing budget of a program to NASA's overall budget, ignoring that NASA hasn't been pouring its overall budget into a single lunar program since then (lack of political will), and ignoring that many of the recent landers are explicitly cheaper missions intended to have some risk of failure, either because the country attempting the landing has never done it before, or because they're trying to stimulate private competition in the industry.
- somenameforme 3y agoAbsolutely. But you're also not really considering that that was starting from literally nothing, and going at a hyper-accelerated rate. Now that we have that knowledge, to say nothing of a million other technological improvements, costs ought be dramatically lower. And indeed the Falcon Heavy's entire development cost about $500 million, over about 3 years of active development. [1] The SLS, which is NASA's latest ship - being developed by Boeing/Lockheed, started 13 years ago and has, so far, cost more than $30 billion (the costs listed on Wiki are 5 years outdated). [2] If/when it is ever completed, its ideal goal will be to carry ~2x as much as a Falcon Heavy, at a launch cost about of well over 20x as much. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Conception_and_funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Conception_and_fu... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System
- nolok 3y agoBecause most of the time it's something small and "dumb" that cause the issue, but with no human there it's not possible to fix it instantly. The difficulty is in planning for every contingency possible in advance, which you can't, and then hope that whichever one your mission encounters is in the list you planned for, essentially.
- yencabulator 3y agoSLIM is a technology demonstrator for landing on slopes, with "pinpoint landing" accuracy (say, 10 meters). Previous landings had to be made on limited large flat areas, deemed relatively safe for several kilometers around, and often the landing happened just in the rough vicinity of the target area, kilometers off the mark.