I was part of the engineering team of the Japanese team Hakuto of the Google Lunar XPRIZE. I always wondered how it would feel to be in the control room at this time, but our launch deal fell through. I can understand what the SpaceIL engineers are going through right now.
Congratulations to all the SpaceIL team for reaching this far, your work has been impressive. Keep trying and you will make it!
The cool thing about it was that was a pet project of a few scientists doing it just because it was cool rather than a proper national project
Like getting a silver medal at the Olympics. Yes, sad. But man!
Don't get me wrong, good on them for doing this, but let's not pretend like this happened in a bubble away from anyone else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon
It came tantalizingly close to working, though, and I have high hopes for future attempts. Per aspera ad astra.
I find it a bit irritating to be that cocky when it comes to space technology. Better luck next time!
Beresheet: (v) To fail dramatically after overwhelming confidence
They are the 4th country to reach the Moon (albeit at 1km/s).
Japan, ESA, India, and SpaceIL all have crashed on the moon (counting as reached).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_on_the_Moon
Only if your pride is traveling at less than 11.2 km/s.
Celebrating space mission failures for any reason is a terrible look.
This is a cultural difference, try to take a step back from your own preconceived cultural norms. What's considered confidence in Israel would qualify as hubris in American culture - there's much less value placed on being humble or soft-spoken in Israeli culture. I make no judgements about if this is better/worse but I certainly wouldn't dream of relishing in their failure even if I perceived them as "cocky".
And ironaically, as you suggest, when one country wins, we in fact all win.
I would much rather we fight to push back the boundaries of space than to hurl actual bombs at each other.
https://mobile.twitter.com/teamspaceil/status/11163129311033...
But still, did you all miss the winking emoji right there following the text?
And we have a few examples of internationalism already like the ISS. And presumably any Mars mission will have to be international. Which is another one of the reasons such projects is worth while.
This is Israel's project. They had assistance from other organizations/countries, but they're not doing this to better North Korea in any real way and you shouldn't hold North Korean responsible for their failure.
Definitely a terrible time to have an engine failure :/
Edit1: Telemetry came back at 10k. For the next minute and a half there was uncertainty about the main engine even though telemetry clearly showed vertical speed going up fast. More then a minute later, at 5k a reset request was made.
Edit2: A minute goes by and at about 500m controller asked if there is a confirmation to send rest to JPL, another, announced that engine is on. Crash happens at that moment. 149m, 134.3ms vertical.
It seems like the landing program would want to have a feature in place that automatically restarted the engine in a situation like this.
Have any of these moon landings been done at night where people have been able to watch it happening through a telescope? Or are things so small at the moon's distance that there'd be nothing to see?
Actual landers tend to try to land during lunar day, to take advantage of the warmer temperatures and to have sunlight to recharge batteries.
Or with more time to recover from the outage before landing. If it happens within the last minute (wild estimation) then you have little time to recover the lost velocity.
I was on a plane that had one engine fail. It was fine.
7th country to get that far in space, 4th to attempt to land, those are enormous achievements for a country that's has 2/3rds the population of New York (city, not state) and doesn't have a hundred billion dollars to burn in a dick-measuring contest. They'll launch another one and land next time.
If Israel knows anything, it's how to persevere.
I would say the opposite. Not specifically just in reference to this mission but in general. They now have a lot of experience and data to use going forward for "not much" expense. A lot of extremely expensive missions were lost because they didn't have the opportunity to iterate.
If I were to make a guess extrapolation to air-flight we're probably still roughly in the 1940s. Private space flight is making things more standard and long-run production instead of one-offs; but we aren't there yet and haven't found workhorse designs that are both reliable and cheap. Experiments like this will hopefully help us get there.
Aircraft production was fully industrial going into the 40s.
hats off to SpaceIL! I look forward to following their next go at it.
Budget for this lunar mission is probably extremely small compared to military spendings.
So the US view of democracy is apartheid? Interesting.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/11/science/space...
I haven't been able to find what it would have done had it landed correctly. (edit) I guess it had a few scientific instruments and a "time-capsule" of sorts. Wikipedia editors are fast, they already have the crash on there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceIL --------------- Payload
The spacecraft carried a "time capsule" created by the Arch Mission Foundation, containing over 30 million pages of analog and digital data, including a full copy of the English-language Wikipedia, the Wearable Rosetta disc, the PanLex database, a Nano Bible (complete Bible in Hebrew), children's drawings, a children's book inspired by the space launch, memoirs of a Holocaust survivor, Israel's national anthem (Hatikvah), the Israeli flag, and a copy of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.[8][35][36][37][38]
Its scientific payload included a magnetometer supplied by the Israeli Weizmann Institute of Science to measure the local magnetic field, and a laser retroreflector array supplied by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to enable precise measurements of the Earth–Moon distance.[39][40] ---------------------
As an aside, the youtube video series on the original Apollo launch computer it pretty neat. (The core memory on those old machines was nuts..)
