Why NASA's First Landing On The Moon in 50 Years Matters - It's Commercial, Cryogenic & Confused

hello it's Scott Manley here it has been an extraordinarily exciting and uh confusing last few days for fans of spaceflight as we watched the culmination of the im1 mission from intuitive machines carrying the space probe adicus to the lunar surface it launched just over a week ago on a falcon 9 a commercial rocket right and it's important to note that this is a commercial lunar Mission uh intuitive machines is a private company they did a lot of the development on their own albeit with some occasional NASA funding this Mission the anchor customer was NASA who spent on something like $120 million for their payloads to go on this spacecraft to the moon but they were not by any means the only customers on this Mission as it happens this was the second mission of the Year following this uh commercial model from NASA the first being astrobotics paragr Lander which launched on the first Vulcan rocket and then promptly overpressured its propellant tanks due to a valve malfunction swung around the moon and then burned up in the atmosphere and to astrobotics credit while they didn't make it to the surface of the Moon they got a lot of love from the community because of their openness and they're willing to share details of spacecraft operations even after it was clear it was never going to make to the surface of the Moon but this meant that adicus had a chance to be the first American spacecraft to soft land on the surface of the Moon in 50 years NASA had of course got sidetracked by that whole Space Shuttle and space station thing they had launched a few really cool space probes around the moon but they hadn't bothered to land anything softly and this Lander in particular could trace its Heritage back over a decade to the Google lunar X prize some of the people who worked on it some of the hardware that was developed goes back to armadillo Aerospace which if you remember is on CarMax company he's the guy that created doom and then after making a ton of money off a quake decided that he wanted to get into rocketry and then lost it all and you know that's how these things go this is a video from armadillo's old YouTube page showing the test of a pressure-fed methane oxygen engine and that is hugely important because while people have been sending spacecraft to the moon for 60 years nobody has tried to land a spacecraft on the moon using a cryogenic Eng Eng all the spacecraft have been using highly toxic hypergolic propellant which is great because you don't need an ignition system but it's not so good because it's just really nasty to work with so anyway this engine was developed for Project Morpheus which it actually began as Project M which was supposed to be like a NASA Skunk Works project to try and put a robonaut on the surface of the Moon after a couple of years that got split into two projects a sort of second generation robonaut which went to the space station and Project Morpheus which was this Lander That was supposed to demonstrate lunar Landing Technologies on Earth it was supposed to demonstrate new new sensor system onboard autonomous Hazard detection and avoidance and that's what this bit of Hardware is on the side here it's scanning The Landing site looking for those rocks and trying to figure out where the Lander can touch down again this was a small lowbudget technology demonstrator performed in collaboration with a commercial organization like armadillo and a number of the people that worked on this would go on to be part of intuitive machines to develop their Lander so with that in mind we had been following this mission for the last week or so and where they quickly established Communications and demonstrated the ability to ignite and operate their methane engine in deep space and this was a first while we have had a Chinese rocket that successfully launched to orbit using meth methyl o it didn't actually ignite its engine until it was outside the at so technically this was a win and then just in case there was any doubters out there I believe they ignited their engine further from the earth than anyone had ever ignited a cryogenic engine so they were absolutely cementing their place in uh you know the record books as true space innovators going out there with those engines that don't have the hypergolic propellants and that's something that NASA is absolutely relying on for its lunar lander both of the spacecraft that being chosen for the human Landing system are going to use cryogenic propellants uh starship's obviously going to use methane and blue origin spacecraft is going to use hydr loocks both of them are going to have to maintain cryogenic propellant in flight on orbit for a long period of time and this is something that was actually previously demonstrated I think on a mission to the space station they had a module which was fixed to the side and it basically kept some cryogenic propellant cooled using a cryocooler and passive Cooling and control systems for a long time so this was something of a Next Step where they were able to actually use the engine for all their operations in space and maybe one day we can abandon these hypergolic after all they're expensive they're toxic and of course methane and oxygen are pretty easy to produce uh in situ across the solar system on Wednesday the spacecraft successfully entered orbit and on Thursday we were watching a live stream of it descending and this can animation from a year ago is vastly more interesting than what the live stream brought us I mean we didn't have any live camera views which is understandable given bandwidth constraints but we didn't have any Telemetry and we certainly didn't have any animation that was being created from that Telemetry we had a bunch of Talking Heads and a clock counting down and to be honest the best part was when we would actually get live audio from the control room and all this sort of glossed over the fact that there had been some serious drama behind the scenes some top tier you know problem solving troubleshooting had been carried out to make this Landing get as far as it did originally we were told it was supposed to land around 426 and I joke that by the way that meant that the engine would be blazing at 420 yeah uh but they delayed it by two hours they delayed it by one orbit why well uh apparently they discovered that somebody had left a safety feature enabled on The Landing laser Guidance the lar system right so obviously when you're working with us on the ground you have safety features so that you don't blind people there was a manual interlock who would stop this activating and somebody had forgotten to you know take this out and so they didn't know until they got to lunar orbit and they tried to turn it on that their liar wouldn't work and guess what it was a complete fluke that this they actually turned this on early so the spacecraft had entered orbit slightly differently than they'd expected and was slightly closer to the Moon than they expected and so they were trying to quantify this perform a maneuver to bring it to a an orbit they were comfortable so they turned on the liar early and eventually figured out that it didn't work and this was really lucky because normally they would only turn this on during the final minutes of descent so landing on the moon required the ability to precisely measure the distance to the surface on previous missions you know going back to the' 60s we've had radar we've had people looking out with their eyeballs and of course the lunar Landers the Apollo Landers they actually had a big stick a contact probe that would uh turn on a light when they were close to the surface you know when it touched the surface but modern spacecraft they like to use liar the reason is that uh using a laser it's much more Compact and because the beam is so narrow you can actually get good measurements at much greater distances than using a radar radar system now for getting into lunar orbit and navigating in lunar orbit you can use radio ranging with the various onboard transmitters and there was actually a payload called ln1 the lunar node one navigation demonstrator which was a small like cubat piece of Hardware stuck on the side it was built at the Marshall space flight center and so while they were in lunar orbit they actually tested this payload and used it with groundbased measurements to actually verify that they were in the correct orbit so this knew where they were with pretty good precision and they could extrapolate that position forward and when they were firing the engines they could use the onboard inertial navigation system with accelerometers and gyroscopes to figure out where they should be but the problem is then you're ex you're integrating this forward that means you're taking the solution and stepping It Forward slowly in time and each step has an error in uh the velocity and the position so you could descend towards the surface surface using this but the errors would grow and grow and by the time you got to the surface you could be going too fast you could be going too slow you could be in the wrong place and getting a touchdown on the surface would be highly unlikely and the orbital navigation Hardware they use just wouldn't be useful on the time scale that was needed to land on the surface and so with this in mind it was extraordinarily fortuitous of them that they had another payload called ndl the navigation Doppler lidar for precise velocity and range sensing and this is a another liar system that was developed by Langley research to do basically the same thing the onboard liar was supposed to do they just needed to figure out how it could talk to The Landing software and provide the exact updates to make sure they could use it during The Descent and they developed a patch for their software integrated with their computer and they committed to a landing in 2 hours and that is about the same amount of time that took to figure out the problem with the abort switch on Apollo 14 if you remember which is another amazing Hack That was performed on a computer so that a landing could be carried out so respect to everyone involved that made that happen um no respect to whoever put together this stream again because this simulation you'll notice is running in a loop and it's showing the spacecraft in an attitude which was absolutely in no way consistent with the physics of the situation I would rather have had the control room it had a lot more interesting stuff going on and you know if you looked really carefully I think there's actually something interesting going up on on in some of these displays this is what I wanted to see it looked like this was a report from the the ndl the the laser thing the hero of the hour if you will so this was just a tiny clue that things were actually progressing it would have been great to have this up on the full screen but apparently at some point they realized that this wasn't supposed to be visible and they cut it out and so yeah for us observers this was really kind of annoying but on the other hand it is well understood these are commercial organizations and they're under no compulsion to actually share any of this stuff with us so anyway the time ticks down and eventually we get to zero and suddenly contact is lost and we're not sure what happens there's a lot of anticipation a lot of question as to whether they are able to get carrier log we can hear over the comms they ask the controllers to look at their last up updated Telemetry you see if there's any clues as to what happens and one person comes back and said they noticed a a roll happening just before they lost contact and this is critical because the High Gain antenna is more or less in a fixed orientation on the side of the spacecraft it was designed to land in a certain place in a certain rotation so that the antenna would be pointed at Earth and so they could actually get the down link Happening Now within a few minutes they said they did have contact they had carrier lock from G hilly in the UK and they were getting some data back but the amateur radio people around the world could see that the data the signal strength wasn't what it should be it would be another 12 hours before we had any further confirmation from intuitive machines and they said that yes we are in fact communicating and commanding the payloads it is down safely and to find out more tune into our press conference with NASA at 5:00 p.m. eastern time and that is a time which I was going to be on a plane and it turned out it was a plane without Wi-Fi also by the way 5:00 p.m. Eastern is after all the stock markets closed and uh intuitive machines is on the stock market so uh you can imagine what would happen to the share price after the uh well this was how they presented the orientation of their Lander yeah it turned out that initial claim that they were upright was in fact based on partial Telemetry that they hadn't got the full story and they were instead actually sitting on their side so that is not only the successful second successful lunar Landing this year but also the second one that fell over during the landing process and you know let's be clear as Kerbal Space Program players we've all been there according to the press conference it was heading down at 6 M hour it was going down range at 2 m hour and the quote from Mission Control that they observed an adverse yaw just as they were touching down says to me that one of the legs on the side dug in and that rotated the spacecraft and caused it to start tipping over it's important to realize that if you're Landing a spacecraft on the moon while the gravity is one sixth that of Earth the inertia of your spacecraft is exactly the same and your sort of tip over velocity the maximum speed at which you can be going laterally before it will upset H drops it actually drops as a square root so typically about 40% of what it would be on earth is sufficient to cause the spacecraft to roll over according to the press conference the spacecraft is lying on panel e which you know there's six sides of the spacecraft so that's panel number five I guess and that's the panel which contains an art piece it's a Jeff Coon's phases of the moon it's called uh it's like supposed to contain a bunch of moons in a cube and they're all slightly different and I guess there's like nfts and things like that Associated so I guess they actually get a bonus point because they are closer to the Moon than they would otherwise be although you might have to change your interpretation of the art now that it is on its side rather than vertical now one of the payloads I was really hoping to see data from right away was Eagle Cam and this is a camera which would be ejected from the side of the spacecraft and track the spacecraft as it's performing the final Landing so it would land on the surface and watch the Lander coming down and that would no doubt have provided some really cool Clues as to what in fact happened except that because of the changes to the uh liar system they inhibited the deployment of the camera and therefore they're trying to decide whether they can in fact deploy this camera in its current orientation just so to get like some third person views of the spacecraft and the other payload that I would really like to see the results of is scalps the stereo camera for lunar plume surface studies and this was a series of multiple cameras on the legs which would be pointed in towards where the rocket engine is hoping to see how the rocket interacts with the lunar surface and that was the idea is they want to figure out how plumes dig down into the lunar surface and whether there's things they can do to perhaps model this physics better and understand how say something like blue Origins Lander might work on the moon here's the thing we don't know how much bandwidth they're going to have to get data back in fact during the press conference it sounded like they were having problems switching over to a stable link to actually get any data down the spacecraft's autonomous systems are designed to switch between two antennas when it's getting poor signal quality so it's switching back and forth before they can get a connection established and fix this problem but assuming they fix this they will be doing most of the communications over low gain and Tennis which means less bandwidth and they are racing against lunar night which is going to come in about a week from now so there's likely to be some sort of triaging to do to decide which data to get down before the spacecraft goes quiet so while the mission is probably going to be considered a success by NASA it's not as successful as we'd like and in terms of communication I don't think they've been hugely successful and we're really asking a lot of questions and not getting answers and of course there are critics saying well there 50 years on from the Apollo program why can't we do so much better than we did back then well guess what this Mission has been made and performed with a budget that is 0.1% of the Apollo program if you compare it to the surveyor program that spent about $5 billion inflation adjusted and you know again this is vastly cheaper the previous missions have been sent to the Moon uh you we've got the lunar reconnaissance Orbiter which is about half a billion Seline about half a billion lady about 280 million these are all much more expensive than each of these clips missions and so NASA is absolutely betting that while they expect some losses they are going to get much more value for money from these commercial organizations and by you know basically funding them they're going to build up an area of expertise in the commercial Market which will enable further Landers and bring the cost down that's what they're hoping and I fully believe that's what's going to happen we've already had two launches this year there are four other launches that are slated for this year alone and I expect failures but you know what quantity has a quality in and off itself I'm Scott Manley fly [Music] [Music] safe [Music]

Channel: Scott Manley

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Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2024