I think the only one that can solve all of their problems is elon. He would fix it in few weeks. Include him in next launch, he will troubleshoot directly on the Moon. Please, someone, send that asshole to space.
And he’s so full of hot air he doesn’t even need a suit.
He would try to smoke the moon regolith and come up with some rad ideas. Occupy Moon! Yeeeeaah
Had me in the first half, ngl
Haha, that was the idea 🤣
Well that’s a facepalm of a faceplant 😂
You’d almost think that by now they might have learned something from the Voyager 1 and 2 power systems and not relied completely on solar power…
The biggest problem with RTGs is the extreme cost and lack of availability. Pu-238 is very expensive and at any moment, there’s only tens of KG of Pu-238 available for RTG use. They’re not really a reasonable choice for private industry at this time.
As true as that is, they said that it cost them hundreds of millions of dollars, and the mission was only planned to last from 10 to 14 days or so. They could have used just a piece of a waste uranium rod or something as an alternate power source for such a short-lived mission.
I mean yeah, of course that would still add to the cost and complexity, and I don’t even know what all that would take, but hell if you’re already into the hundreds of millions of dollars range, you ought to consider redundancy and alternate power sources.
I imagine it’s more complicated than that. For example, Pu-238 only emits alpha radiation. I doubt that reactor waste only emits alpha radiation, meaning you’d have to harden the electronics for a close and potentially extreme emitter of beta/gamma radiation. I also don’t know if random high grade reactor waste gets hot enough to provide meaningful amounts of energy via thermoelectric means. Alternatively, it may be that it gets too hot.
I doubt they could have simply slapped something together. The cost of developing a new RTG capable of using reactor waste would likely be a significant fraction of the budget to develop the probe itself. It might have been worth it, but I feel that it’s not clear-cut.
They also used the same design of a prior craft that met the same fate. But private industry are problem solvers. 🙄
I’d like to share a design concept with IM given that this is their second moon topple:
The first one fell over and sank into the
swampcrater.Sooooo we built another one
That sank into a crater. So we built a third one. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into a crater. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Lad, the strongest spacecraft on all of the Moon.
When one day we get people back on the moon, is there a chance these devices could be brought back online?
Brought back*
No need for this trash on the moon, even if it works.
Breaking news, space is really really hard
A hard void.
Whoopsi-doodles. Well, more spare parts on the Moon, all the same.
He’s dead, Jim.
Seems Firefly Aerospace has got this all sorted, though. Amazing feat for them last week to have a flawless landing.
This could have potentially happened to Apollo 11, had Armstrong not taken over manually to steer clear of the targeted landing site with some rough areas. Maybe it would have been just leaning and not a big deal, but at the time we had no clear idea what a real landing would end up like. And I would hazard a guess that even though we’ve done a lot over the decades, the polar regions of the Moon are still pretty unknown.
…but at the time we had no clear idea what a real landing would end up like…
Surveyor - “What am I? Chopped liver???”
Landing a fridge on those spindly little legs did seem a bit… optimistic…
Company that topled a mooncraft… topled another mooncraft.
