Israeli Moon probe crashes at the last minute but SpaceX scores with Falcon Heavy launch The first attempt by a private company to land a probe on the Moon's surface ended in failure on Thursday when the vehicle crashed minutes before it was supposed to land. The Beresheet lander, run by Israeli firm SpaceIL, was due to touch down on the lunar regolith after months spent getting into position. The lander carried a …
Not necessarily, using airbags (like Mars Pathfinder), still counts as lithobraking. As long as your probe (why don't we call them what they really are, space robots!) uses and impact to slow it down, I guess that would count, so airbags, springs, crumple structure so all count.
Although I suppose if you look at it that way, any probe that drops the last few inches might count as lithobraking...
Root cause of the failure: artificial deadlines. From the New York Times, a paragraph now deleted: "After firing up its main engine to slow its speed, the spacecraft began its descent of no return, guided by a laser that measured its altitude. 'It's a system that was quite challenging in the development and arrived quite late,' said Mr. Doron said (sic) on Wednesday. That limited the amount of testing".
No, Mr Doron, you limited the amount of testing. You attempted to operate the engine outside its design parameters and did not bother to test first.
Lets try the alternate plan taking more time. Presumably you are going to do something in that time which will cost money. If you do not have the money you have to store your spaceship in the cupboard until more money appears. Unfortunately you cannot store your employees in a cupboard. Without money they are likely to wander off hunting for food. If more money does eventually appear you will not get all your employees back. You will have to find new ones who will then cost time and money to understand the project.
Part of the reason Beagle 2 performed an unplanned lithobraking manoeuvre involved time and money. Testing facilities have to be booked months in advance. At the time money was not there. Money did appear later but testing facilities were then booked up past the launch date of the ride share.
Both projects decided to go with what they had rather than risk not going at all.
And the bit about operating outside its parameters? The manufacturer said, "don't push the evelope". They pushed it.
The engine did not have time to cool sufficiently before they required restart, per the manufacturer.
This is not quite as bad as Challenger, mostly because no one died, but it is exactly the same class of failure.
Testing is part of the Agile 'methodology'?
So is requirements gathering. And you can only test to the small set of requirements. Anything outside the requirements is not important and can be sorted out next release.
Little requirements like a soft landing. Hey, we only need that right at the end so we will throw what we have over the fence and then start of developing the soft landing requirement.
Just for the record, it's looking like Beagle 2 actually made it to the surface intact, according to images made by one of the orbiting spacecraft recently. What seems to have occurred is that the craft failed to deploy properly and was not able to bring it's communications antenna online.
They spend in space ten minutes instead of two weeks. Falcon payload can't be returned to Earth (but with its own re-entry system) They will never support a crew of seven for two weeks with full EVA capabilities and a robotic arm to help. Payload weight is not everything - payload dimensions can be important as well - the Shuttle had a 18.3 m long and 4.6 m wide cargo bay. The Falcon has a cylindrical space of only 6.6m which becomes 11 if you can fit things in the conical space.
They are a great system - but to match Space Shuttle capabilities it will take a lot more.
No one want to duplicate the Space Shuttles capabilites, because those capbilities are not useful any more. SpaceX have the Dragon2, which will do most of what the SS did at the end of its life (deliver people to the ISS), which is exactly what it was designed to do. The dragon 1 also outperforms the other cargo capsules in that it can return a decent mass from the ISS. The SpaceX reusable system is massively cheaper than the SS, but does an awful lot.
And of course. SpaceX have Starship, which will outdo the SS if it works.
No actually they don't duplicate such capabilities because they are not able to make it at an acceptable price - not because they aren't useful.
Hubble would have been billion dollars wasted without those capabilities. The ISS would have never been built without the Shuttle, and as soon as the ISS is dumped into the sea the Dragon will become quite useless - you go to space, and then? Sure, you can launch a separate platform - which will add to the overall cost anyway - especially if that platform is quite large and can't return.
Space is becoming increasingly crowded, and the idea of launching satellites and leaving them there as garbage to rot for ages will become soon not acceptable. Expensive ones could be refurbished, other will need to be properly disposed of - especially if they become dangerous. Not all this kind of missions will be possible with robotic missions only - just look at their failure rate every time they attempt something more complex than pointing a space telescope.
Shuttle was built with space-operation capabilities. It was used as a launcher or an astronaut bus to the ISS, and for that it was uselessly expensive. Big mistake. It couldn't be a commercial vehicle.
But to build the next station, and the next space operation capabilities away from any station, we will need something alike the Shuttle again.
Just hope the Internet and mobile phones won't have zeroed people IQ meanwhile.
"It put the ISS into space" [Shuttle]
"As soon as the ISS is gone it's useless" [SpaceX]
Pick one, you cannot claim the shuttle both provides for the ISS but was not dependent on it, and SpaceX "relies" on the ISS but could not have provided for it. As that's also what the Shuttle did.
You cannot claim that the Hubble would not have existed, if like, that's *also* what other heavy lift launchers do.
Yes, SpaceX has no orbital crew systems, because that's not what they are tasked or aiming at.
No need to pick one.
The Shuttle could lift the ISS pieces - and act as a "space workshop" to assemble it - and still could work as a "space station" itself. It did with the SpaceLab before the ISS existed - and could bring it back to reuse it.
Look at the Dragon 2 very limited EVA capabilities, and compare them with the Shuttle. Without an orbital outpost, the Dragon becomes quite useless. And good luck to replace the ISS in the current geopolitical situation.
Hubble would have existed - sure, it could have been launched on a heavy launcher - but it could not have been repaired. It would have been a big piece of space junk barely usable after a lot of image post-processing to remove the mirror issues. Pray that Webb has no issues, as nothing can reach it at its Lagrangian station... a real improvement would have been to operate at greater distances.
Astronautics went back more than fifty years - as pure "space operations" capabilities. Back to launch rockets and get capsules back from low orbits.
I suspect that the Monolith merely objected to the unnecessary inclusion of godbothery literature in the payload.
(The Monolith is an equal opportunities object, and dislikes equally all propaganda for any varieties of gods, lest anyone try to read something in particular into this post that isn't there.)
I don't mean this as criticism of Nammo's engine, it got them to the moon and landing was always ambitious. Well done to the whole team.
I did find the UK news coverage a little amusing as over the course of the week every story mentioned "British built main engine" in the first paragraph until last night when it became a failure of the Israeli spacecrafts main engine that caused the crash.
This post has been deleted by its author
This wasn't the first time Beresheet's engine failed to burn. On February 26th we learned that Beresheet failed to conduct a scheduled burn[1][2]. The cause was a Single Event Effect[3], a radiation event that disrupted the computer. Beresheet's software was modified to make it more robust to these events[4].
There was a problem with the star trackers. Star trackers are notoriously difficult. SpaceIL handled that problem well.
As of now we don't have definitive word on what exactly went wrong during the landing burn. What we do know is that IMU2(inertial measurement units) failed and everything went sideways(literally and figuratively).
As Meatloaf sang, "Two outta three ain't bad." I, for one, hope the team gets another shot.
[1] http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/449107
[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/setback-for-israeli-lunar-lander-as-computer-glitch-prevents-scheduled-maneuver/
[3] https://radhome.gsfc.nasa.gov/radhome/see.htm
[4] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=47217.msg1918211#msg1918211
If you really want to get your space geek on NSF(citation [4]) has over 400 mostly informative posts about Beresheet alone.
Quite possibly, but the last dual landing I saw video of, the two boosters landed simultaneously.
Whilst I am aware of forth and some of its features, I never seriously dabbled in it myself.
Java is a more likely candidate, forth was one step up from machine code!
My Reg handle is derived from something else entirely but cunningly modified to sound computery.
Busted!
The article says
"We didn't make it but we really tried," said X Prize founder Peter Diamandis, who was at the launch. "The achievement has been tremendous and I think we can be proud."
I think it's actually Morris Kahn s(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Kahn, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceIL#Founders_and_supporters) speaking, not Peter Diamandis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Diamandis). Check the photos, and the apparent age of the speaker.
Both definitely rate consideration on this day. Mr Kahn funded a substantial part of the Beresheet probe personally. Peter Diamandis has had a significant role in moving space flight forward through a lifelong devotion to the topic as can been seen from his involvement in the Ansari X Prize (leading to today's nearly complete Virgin Galactic space tourism business), the Lunar X Prize (leading to Beresheet), the International Space University(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_University), SEDS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_the_Exploration_and_Development_of_Space) and more.
Indeed. They gave up on Mr. Stevens and the giant butterfly net though. Instead they made it saltwater corrosion-resistant and pluck them from the sea. Each fairing half has avionics so it knows and can report where it is, thrusters for (presumably) attitude correction and perhaps some guidance and parachutes that allow it to land it fairly gently in the ocean.
Musk tweeted that they are going to reuse them on a Starlink flight this year. Starlink is SpaceX's own planned constellation of mini-sats that will provide global internet access. It's a nice way to demonstrate reusability of the fairings without having to deal with an external customer.
Why do all these projects fail when push comes to shove?
They always fail at a transition point; all the stuff in between, the flying around making a lot smoke and noise stuff, is always OK. But try and change flight profile and bang; it's crashed.
The answer is obvious; just point the noisy, smokey things straight up and fire them off. We can then watch them for the next 40 years as they very slowly, very slowly indeed, exit the Solar System.
Basically, I'm asking, "What's the point"? It's all so marginal. They are sphincter rending dangerous. They can't carry anything. They can't bring anything back. They are snailish slow. And they cost a fortune. The Celts had the common sense not to try and build a trans-Atlantic shipping industry based on coracles. Why are we so much more stupid?
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