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As a former Intuitive Machines employee, I feel obligated to correct the title! IM-1 landed on the moon last February and although it didn't stay upright, it wa
by inamberclad 2y ago
As a former Intuitive Machines employee, I feel obligated to correct the title! IM-1 landed on the moon last February and although it didn't stay upright, it was still operational and returned some decent scientific data.
- dang 2y ago(This comment was posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43235933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43235933, where the title was "Firefly Aerospace becomes first commercial company to successfully land on moon". We merged that thread hither.)
- koolala 2y agoIt was flipped upside-down like a Turtle?
- itishappy 2y agoSideways. Still functional, but in somewhat limited capacity.
- adityaathalye 2y agoSo... the mission literally went sideways? Yet, our indomitable heroes saved the day! Jokes apart, I think anybody getting anything off the ground and out of the planetary gravity well are heroes. It's kind of wild how... mundane... rocketry has become. Between that and always-on nearly-free global video calling from a smart watch, I feel like I'm living in the future of some of the 1950s SciFi books I read as a kid. "Kings of Space" by Capt. W. E. Johns comes to mind. The smell of that old paperback copy I have transports me to another time.
- inamberclad 2y agoThat was a separate lander, from Japan!
- somenameforme 2y agoWell how else do you expect to be able to keep the Moon up?
- consumer451 2y agoFormer and current employees, congratulations to you all! How cool is it to have your work preserved for thousands to millions of years, on the surface of the moon?! I cannot imagine much anything more fun.
- Eridrus 2y agoCongratulations to both teams :) Getting to the moon at all is a huge accomplishment. The article actually mentioned IM-1 (though not by name) and got me looking.