this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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The 2024 privately funded moon lander is doing worse than some 1970s lunar landers by America and the failed state of the USSR. God damn.
And it's doing it for around 0,05% of the price. (~$250 billion adjusted for inflation for Apollo 1 vs ~$120 million for IM-1)
TBF that’s a cheat. They didn’t have to be the ones investigating, researching, and developing everything to make it all work for the first time.
The science today is very well established. While it doesn’t lessen the difficulty, nobody is reinventing the wheel at full price. They’re standing on the shoulders of very well established giants.
Actually they reinvented the wheel a little bit by being the first spacecraft that used cryogenic propellant for a multi day mission/moon landing. When you look into it, what they've achieved is still very impressive, even if NASA did much of the heavy lifting.
Capitalism is all about efficiency. An efficient total loss is somehow a win!
Yes, this is embarrassing, and proves private enterprise isn't always better as is often claimed.
Mars lander Viking 1 was successful in 1976, a missions that was way harder to accomplish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1
Yes going to the moon is very easy.
Can't believe they failed that task.
I don't see how the failed state of the USSR is noteworthy when talking about historic space missions. The USSR might have collapsed but they had a lot of space successes. First human in space, for instance.
More or less that the idea of how the country that got Humans into space first eventually collapsed, but "modern capitalism solves all problems" can't do the same tasks as well was 1950's USSR, and that's coming from someone who doesn't like the USSR in general.