I was just watching it live, cheering for SpaceIL, it's a pity that the landing was not successful.
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!
Private but partially funded by the government; the PM was at the launch and had (before the crash) been trumpeting it as a success for the country as a whole
It doesn't make much difference any way. It's a private venture, his statement was just meant as cheer leading / consolation. I do hope they'll have another go, but it has very little to do with who's in government.
To be fair the hardest and most expensive part was handled by a US company. Many small countries have put satellites up using launchers from the larger players.
In the same way that 'getting to space' is not nearly as impressive as 'getting to orbit', there is another large step to 'getting to trans-lunar injection'.
It's perfectly reasonable to show the differences in two achievements, and doing so doesn't imply the derision of either.
In any case, I love that so many people around the world are able to participate in the exploration of our sky, and will celebrate every single step that makes it easier and cheaper, regardless of where the people making it happen happen to live.
Also a lot of countries have an advantage in space access over Israel: Israel prefers to launch on retrograde orbit flight paths so that any debris falls into the Mediterranean instead of on their neighbors to the east. I don't blame them for hitching a ride.
Oh I didn't even think we needed to get into that part since it was stated. I'm saying their space program has directly benefited from the ongoing relationship with the US allowing them to develop as far as they have.
OP was pointing out how far they got despite being such a small nation, I'm just saying that's not an accurate statement whatsoever based on what actually happened.
Contract "here is some money to meet these contractual requirements".
I think you're confusing SpaceX with United Launch Alliance (ULA), who's Annual Capability Payment of $1 billion per year was given to them literally so they can keep the lights on. A lot of congressmen were seeing red when ULA decided to not even bother with a bid for the most recent GPS launches (which SpaceX cleaned house with overall) where SpaceX required zero subsidy and managed to do it cheaper in every way.
My point, which I'll just keep remaking here, is that pointing out the "super tiny" population of Israel is disingenuous since the intent is to show Israeli exceptionalism. If I was claiming "NASA is the best, way better than Israel whom NASA helped" then your whataboutism would be a valid critique. But I'm not saying that.
Pointing out the population relative to the US/China is the "Tony Stark built this in a cave from spare parts" argument, but that's not really what happened here. It's more "Tony Stark built this from a schematic given to him by Reed Richards and using parts gifted from Hank Pym" (to stretch my Marvel analogy as far as possible). It's still impressive, but that statement doesn't provide clarification to the accomplishment's significance.
TL;dr- "Israel did a cool thing, and they had lots of international help doing it" is the accurate statement on what happened.
If someone puts a gun to your head and says "Do this thing or you and your family will be executed" it doesn't make you the same as them. Coming from Nazi Germany does not make them necessarily Nazis.
Well, Von Braun was most definitely a nazi and not driven by threats of bodily harm. He was just very into rockets, and worked with whoever let him develop them.
0.1% the budget because they didn't have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to research and build the last 60 years of space technology - rolling progress forward one painful, costly mistake at a time - to do it. Hardly seems reasonable to use such a comparison or make such a point given the actual context.
> 0.1% the budget because they didn't have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to research and build the last 60 years of space technology
That sort of argument isn't very honest or reasonable. Would you believe it would make any sense to point out the centuries of R&D work and countless money spent on it prior to the creation of the US space program to insinuate that the US freeloaded its way into one of mankind's most important achievements?
The US and China could (and have) put a probe on the moon for far less than $100B. $100MM is still a great accomplishment, but let's not exaggerate it.
Iraq and Afghanistan have each 5 times the population of Israel, and only 33% more aid than Israel. Also, both Iraq and Afghanistan are desperately poor countries against which the US waged war, causing further destruction. What's the reason for Israel's aid?
Hm. I see very well what the US does for Israel: 4.5 billion in military aid, constant international support (vetoed 44 UN security council resolutions against Israel), passed illegitimate laws in several states to punish those who support a boycott of Israel, recently recognized the illegal annexation of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, puts orthodox Jews in charge of drafting peace plans with the Palestinians, etc.
But what does Israel do for the US? It's not very clear to me. The only thing I know of is intelligence. Is that enough? I think even Saudi Arabia provides much more support: military bases, etc.
Contrast with Elon Musk saying the next launch of the Falcon Heavy (today) has a 5-10% chance of failure. [1] This is after it has already successfully launched once.
Or Musk persistently pointing out how he expected the first Falcon Heavy launch to explode as the most likely outcome. The early intense trauma of SpaceX failures I think taught him valuable lessons in humility when it comes to space.
There may be problems with the business itself but the cars are real, they work well, and people love them. They're even best selling in their category in some countries. The fact that Tesla is now a mainstream production car company is incredibly impressive.
The problem isn't that people are demanding accurate dates for launches and then getting mad he wasn't exactly correct, the problem is that he is underestimating launch times significantly and stating them publicly with confidence.
But these are actual dates he gives his engineers. Unsurprisingly, engineering is very difficult. He's pushing them to reach the stars, and they've only managed to reach the moon so to speak. He's fanatical about pushing them to be their very best (depending on your POV).
(The prefix "ב" meaning "in", the root "ראש" meaning "head" --used both for the part of the body, and to mean "starting" or "principal"--and the suffux "ית" being the a type of feminine suffix)
That said, it is the Hebrew name of the book of scripture commonly called "Genesis" in English, because it's the first word (incipit) of that book. So people who translate it as "genesis" are not totally making it up, and arguably it's a more poetic translation since the name of the book is (presumably) why they chose that name for the craft.
Netanyahu has a tendency to credit himself with any Israeli achievement as part of his personality cult he is encouraging. I bet he made it obvious that he is going to be in the control room.
I'm sure/I'd hope the actual engineers on the project wouldn't align to that tweet's wording by the marketing team (aka, they prob wouldn't be that cocky/have phrased it that way themselves).
That being said, ESA landed on a comet. Which is arguably a much harder shot to make ;) literally, you shoot, wait a decade, and cross your fingers during landing ^^
They got down at the expected speed just fine. Except that speed is enough to bounce two times if your harpoons fire but don't stick in the crust because it is even more crunchy than expected.
This comment thread is both celebratory and hateful, truly disgusting from Hn.
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".
I don’t know if anyone is celebrating just because it was an Israeli mission but since I started following the mission there were few tweets similar to the one in question. On the first one I just rolled my eyes and on the second one I rooted for a failure just to to imagine how annoyed the PR person would be. I know it’s not a logical behavior but it’s not affecting the outcome, so... I guess if you’re going to be overly confident and “do” when everyone else is “attempting”, you better deliver.
Are you telling us that in Israel confidence is replaced by hubris- the kind of over-confidence that makes you forget about your limits, underestimate dangers, antagonize people around you, and ultimately cause your own downfall? Well, good luck then, they'll need it!
What's considered hateful in most cultures is considered light-hearted an fun in HN culture. Truly ignorant of you to criticize this. It's culture-shaming.
It's tongue-in-cheek. I think it's dumb that criticizing hubris in the manner seen in this comment thread is seen as hateful just because hubris is part of someone's culture.
Well, I'm Israeli, and hubris is not part of my personal culture, but it is prevalent in Israel. IMHO it's a real problem for Israel because people here tend to be euphoric and unaware of the consequences of our decisions.
On the other hand, it does make us more daring and in today's world it is a great way to "succeed"
Yes, until you piss off too many people around you with your excessive confidence- which includes a sense of superiority and the feeling of being immune from the consequences of evil or hostile actions.
And if you made everybody around you an enemy rather than a friend, sooner or later you'll pay the consequences.
I'll play the contrarian and suggest that a space race is the best kind of national pride. If you're okay with football (soccer) or Olympics pride, this is, in my mind, better still.
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.
It took me a while to understand what's going on in these comments before I was reminded of the 30 Rock episode where a Canadian character has trouble understanding sarcasm because there aren't many Jews there.
But still, did you all miss the winking emoji right there following the text?
My point really wasn't that these folks got what's coming to them for their arrogance. My point is that this isn't a mission of international we're-all-in-this-together cooperation. It is very much viewed by the Israeli's running the mission as a part of the nation-state space race.
It's true. As an Israeli it's a very secreterian narrative was built around this endeavor.
We have in Israel a very deep rooted siege mentality, which considering our history is not surprising. Our current powers at be foster this feeling of pride and fear because it is a great way to keep political power.
It is rather sad that every Israeli endeavour is tainted by these sentiments. I am trying to ignore it but I kind of hoped for failure, I thought I couldn't handle the nationalistic euphoria orgy we would have in the media if we did land.
This! While my sentiment may feel a bit Star Trekky/naive, our quest to get to the stars will only succeed if we, as a planet, pull together. If we dont, we'll be limited to this solar system. China, US, India, Israel, Russia (sorry for anyone else Im missing :-)), are all pioneers and we should celebrate their successes, and continued desire to push the envelope.
The issue every single country you listed is that space tech and ICBM tech are virtually the same. Those countries are good at it because they make excellent missiles for war. It is a sad reality. NASA and the DoD work hand in hand together, and virtually always have.
I completely agree. War drives innovation, its a very sad reality. Though in order to get further than our solar system, we'll either need to destroy ourselves, or combine our resources. Some are already trying, and its great. Others have a way to go before realizing this. Very altruistic, I know. Though I think some altruism is needed!
It’s time to retire the ignorant notion that nation-state space programs can be morally disentangled from the governments pursuing them in no small part for political ends. Their success is the regime’s success.
Indeed, and the Israeli project was a new experiment in low cost, volunteer rich space exploration. Its outcome and repetition _is_ significant to everyone. Indeed, nationalistic associations distract from rather than enhance a project.
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.
Agree to disagree here. The whole "we're all one people thing" is a great idea and all (I'm a huge fan, would love for the U.N. to be something other than the personification of national relations and instead be a real governing body) but that's not how things work.
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.
Disagree to agree here. It should really be how things can work. We have the opportunity and possibly the unity to get together on a vision for mankind for the first time in history. Obviously there are challenges, but if all people got to vote in their respective democraties for a global push to space - I would be surprised to not see it approved.
Should is a dangerous word. Just because you or I think something should happen doesn't mean it is in any way realistic. It seems we're a competitive species, and we rarely do anything really hard if it doesn't offer a chance to be the first or best at something, or to better someone else.
That doesn't mean it's impossible, just that we need something to change the market, not fairy tales about international cooperation. Elon Musk's project to massively decrease the cost of space access is a step in the right direction. I don't think we'd ever get to widespread space activity if we depend on massive spending by national governments to do it.
> Obviously there are challenges, but if all people got to vote in their respective democraties for a global push to space - I would be surprised to not see it approved.
My point is that I would be very much surprised to see it approved, as it appears to be the people themselves who have become against these sorts of global pushes.
Yes, it should be the goal, I was raised on Star Trek, I'm just saying that doesn't seem likely.
> On the way down, the main engine cut out. The engine was successfully restarted, but then communications were cut off, and no more information was sent back.
Definitely a terrible time to have an engine failure :/
Based on the telemetry from the broadcast it seems that there was a failure at 13km that resulted in both telemetry and engine loss. When telemetry connection came back vertical speed has already doubled and it kept going up until spacecraft hit the ground. Engine was probably never restarted.
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.
From the NY Times story “We are resetting the spacecraft to try to enable the engine.”
I can't tell from that if normally an engine outage would automatically restart but didn't or if the condition would always require manual intervention. I hope we get more details soon. The moon seems close enough (a few seconds), but accidents always happen closest to your destination. More automation is more complexity but it will be valuable for longer trips.
When they said the engine had a problem the altitude was 678m and vertical velocity was 130.1m/s. After restart it was 149m at 134.3m/s. They never had a chance. Assuming those numbers were correct. A few minutes before they had lost the intertial measurement unit.
then communications were cut off, and no more information was sent back.
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?
It might be a stretch to call it a landing, but the LCROSS mission maneuvered a Centaur upper stage to a controlled crash on the moon. IIRC it was done at night so that telescopes on Earth could see it, but none actually did.
Actual landers tend to try to land during lunar day, to take advantage of the warmer temperatures and to have sunlight to recharge batteries.
The resolution a 10 meter telescope on Earth can make out of the moon is about 22 meters per pixel. We can yet make out the moon landing site with earth based telescope.
Making a 23 metre mark on the moon seems like a natural project for some country, then. Perhaps easier than orchestrating a soft landing.
There are lunar retroreflectors about a metre across [0] that are detectable with optical equipment, for some definition of optical. But to leave a mark that can be seen from earth - to leave your tag, or an X, or a crude drawing of a penis and testes - surely that's an urge as old as art itself.
Just watched the ted talk from the woman who came up with the algorithm to photograph the black hole and she had a slide of the best picture we can get of the moon from earth and she said each pixel on that picture could fit something like 600,000 oranges. don't think it's possible that we can see a spacecraft landing on the moon with what we have.
When you're floating along on a stable orbit not about to impact the surface.
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.
Not an engine failure, but: "Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience." http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
It was. Some people in the audience were clapping when the announcement came that the engine was back on, but quite a few other people were shaking their heads and shushing them.
There was mention there about IMU issues - losing track of where you're pointing, then trying to recover could mean you're pointing the wrong way (while still running the main engine ....)
Surprised by the sheer number of naysayers on the thread. What is wrong with you people?
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.
Article subtitle: "The failure of the landing highlighted the risks of a fast and cheap approach to space exploration."
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.
The history of rocketry really took off during WW-II, and was further refined by the military (generic, but pretty much the nations that have successfully landed on the moon), further developing and releasing to civilian government, and eventually private interests.
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.
If at first, you fail, try and try again. This was sobering. I watched expecting the normal rush I get when watching live events of this nature but it was not to be.
Landings and take offs are always the hardest part of any aerospace event. You're much more likely to see system or mechanical failures when you first start everything up or try to stop moving on an uneven surface.
It seems Israel is doing just fine economically and technologically. So I don't get why US politicians still justify giving out O($billion) every year in foreign aid while there are ample opportunities to spend them in their own country.
Because if you just gave billions of dollars to Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon people would complain. So you give it to someone and make them buy from these guys.
I am not sure what connection that Buzz Aldrin had to the folks at SpaceIL but thought he had a pretty classy tweet tonight. Guess everyone in the space community pulls for each other.
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.
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]
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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..)
I don't understand how you even attempt to recover from failures that occur during a descent like this. Latency to the moon appears to be 1.3 seconds. How much time do you have to do anything?
Far from it. Both the USA and USSR have crashed multiple landers before successfully touching one down. And that doesn't even count intentional "impactor" missions that came before that.
This project wasn't started by the state or by any university. This was a, mostly, volunteer project that wanted to excite children about STEM and space and to educate the young generation. The Prime Minister was invited because it was cool, but it was a private endeavour.
So now you want to convince me that in 1969 they could man land on the moon and then come back to earth and in 2019 they still trying to nail down the tech ?
We have both landed and crashed on Mars and the Moon recently. We're not just trying to figure this out, we're trying to figure it out AND do it cheaply.
Do I detect a bit of condescension in NYT's tone? Do we need to remind the numerous failures US & USSR had before they got their space program off the ground? Also, they forgot India who did send a lunar orbiter and sent a probe on Moon's surface back in 2008.
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!