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

I basically waited for your analysis rather than bother to get anyone else's. As usual it was worth the wait.

The name Odysseus is kind of ironic considering how IM-1 took the shortest possible route

Homer’s Odysseus wasn’t exactly known for an uneventful journey either.

Thank you Scott for pointing out what we all missed, that LIVE feed from a side body cam looking down towards the landing legs. It would have been great PR for them to stream that the way SpaceX now streams their landings. We all know a space mission can "go squirrelly" on you at anytime, but as we know this, we expect to see the odd "ooops" happening. Congrats to the IM team on getting there and down without resorting to Litho-Braking.

2024 is the Year of Sideways Moon Landers! 😂

I helped design those full tanks on the Armadillo lander and did all the welding and joint design on them also, using a custom made welding positioner that I designed and built, and welded the tanks together using an old Hobart tig welding machine, all by hand. They pressure tested the tanks about a thousand times, I think, and then flew the test tanks. I work in aerospace and defense, on rockets, landers, and weaponry. We also built a lander for the NASA sponsored contest. We had freat success building our own spherical tanks, then contracted with the Armadillo tean to build their tanks. Again, we used our design to meet they're mounting and ports needs. They flew before we could, so it knid of backfired. We didnt know that the tanks were the last thing holding them up, other than a few tests. We exceeded Lockheed's and ULA's testing cycles with the tanks keeping their structural integrity by hundreds of times. You dont need robotics to do this kind of quality. You need patience, an understanding of metallurgy, what heating and cooling does to a weld joint, more patience, and dedication to the Art. Never give up. I have 52 years, and even more if you count my childhood projects, of metal working experience. These landers came about with Shear-Will, and alot of private funding and volunteers working on them. The creative talents were Outstanding! Kevin, Mike and Mike, and alittle help from myself, made these projects happen. I have never worked with a brighter collection of creative people. It was an honor to be a part of it. There are Gophers everywhere. Gotta watch out for Gopherholes. Next time, bring gopher snakes with you.

Great Explanation Scott. I found the lack of detail in the news hard to work with. You have presented the details awesome as usual :)

Glad the side with the artwork related to nfts was covered

That one engineer: You never specified orientation after touchdown.

They didn't play KSP enough. Vertical soft landing is very hard, prone to tipping over, even on flat and smooth surface, let alone on uneven and rocky surface like moon.

Good report. When I saw how tall the lander is and how narrow the landing gear by comparison it seemed like it was designed to tip over.

I fallen and I can’t get up! Did they put life alert on this? 😊

If KSP has taught me anything, it's that this is exactly what is supposed to happen.

The NFTs landed face down... well, relatively speaking, it's nice to see nothing of value was lost there. 🤭

Thanks for the Post, Master Manley! Somehow it seems A fair number of us didn't get the message, or maybe were too Drunk or lazy to pay attention to any aspect of this Lunar Mission. I hang my head in shame... But you managed to inject a good dose of drama and Excitement into just describing the darned thing. THANKS!!!

Wow 4.9k comments! Quite impressive… Thanks for always putting out quality content. So many channels are clickbait quality with some robotic voice reading misspelled words off a script! Keep up the great work.

I have passed on a few clickbait headlines earlier cause I knew 'Scott Manley' would have the facts, and he did. Thank you sir you do a fantastic job.

"Houston, I've fallen! And I can't get up!!"

I need more understanding why the EagleCam had to be disabled. I thought it was autonomous once it ejected. Would have been SUPER HELPFUL to see why this sucker is on its side. They need 1-2 EagleCams on all future lander missions.

Not to sound too much like a fanboy, but frankly, without your breakdowns and insight, I don't think most of us would truly know what was going on with space exploration at the moment. Me and my kids watch every video and talk about it for an hour or two, draw pictures and play Kerbal to see things for ourselves. Know that you are a hero to so many more people than you may think. Thank you.

Respect to the guys that reconfigured the 'tag on' LIDAR system- to integrate it with the main landing software in UNDER ONE ORBIT! Deep respect. Working under that kind of pressure without making any mistakes... Impressive is an understatement.

Rookie mistake They didn’t quick save before the final decent

We learnt from the Apollo moon missions that PR is incredibly important and not a trivial thing. This largely was a PR disaster - from the completely underwhelming and confusing countdown to the landing - to the silence and bad communications afterwards. All needs to get much slicker if they want to impress the American and world public- not an issue for science of course but issue for future missions.

They should make the landing feet parabolic to avoid digging in at weird angles.

Hey Scott, back about 20yrs ago Goodyear tried using a LIDAR system during one of our holiday shut-downs, since we were already X-raying 100% of our big truck tires. Testing proved that it worked great on 100% all of the 100's of finished tires scanned that passed through it on the conveyor. When production returned it worked great for a couple of hours then started malfunctioning. To make a long story short, the LIDAR worked great on the cold tires that had been left on the conveyers for 2 weeks for testing, but once the freshly cooked hot tires made it to the LIDAR booth, even after an hour making the trip the radiant heat absolutely destroyed the image. 😎👍

The landing was reminiscent of all our toils in Kerbal Space Program!

Shows how successful Chandrayaan 3 Landing Mission from ISRO (India) was. It costed even less!

It's amazing how 54 years after landing 2 astronauts on the moon we struggle to send an unmanned lander there.

Unbelievable that there wasn’t an electronic status or alarm indicating the LIDAR safety was not in the launch configuration

Help I've fallen and can't get up!

2:45 pretty sweet terrain mapping radar! I wonder if nowadays they’d implement a phased array instead and use some SAR methods for mapping as they approached or traveled over the surface

Odysseus landing on its side is like a representation of how the world has fallen on its side into an Idiocracy.

I REALLY hope they manage to get the Eaglecam working. I would love for my universities contribution to this lander to be some of the best space meme material of all time.

I’m old enough to remember that “We choose to go to the moon and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard” speech. Hats off to Intuitive Machines for overcoming huge challenges in nav equipment.

Thank you Scott ! That is the first constructive explanation of what happened.

Has anybody noticed how TALL modern lander designs are compared with previous ones. While having six lander legs is nice, the center of mass of a vehicle should be lower if they are going to have that high a lateral speed while landing. What will happen when manned missions don't have a 0 kph lateral speed? Squatter vehicles or even landing skis may be the option for lower budget missions...

THIS is why I subscribe to this channel. Explanations and analysis that put the mainstream media (and many other RU-vid channels) to shame. Thanks Scott for answering all the questions I had, and many more I hadn't even thought about.

This shows how ISRO's mission was impressive! They not only provided live telemetry but also showcased live animations, photos and videos. Landing upright near the challenging South pole, deploying a rover, conducting scientific experiments, performing a lunar hop test and successfully returning it's orbital module back to Earth's orbit- all achieved within a budget of just under 75 million dollars, making it the most cost-effective moon landing mission to date!

Love your content Scott. Another reason we were able to do this 50 years ago versus now is simply the human factor. A human is going to be able to correct for abnormalities during landing far better than any preprogrammed computer can.

Looks like we need the old NASA 1969 technicians to show us how to use all our latest technology, in landing a successful mission on the moon? Oh wait....... they forgot how to do it. Silly me.

It's 2024 and a first time in 50 years effort involving a first use ever system can't successfully follow a pre-flight checklist. That sounds about right. 🤦🏻‍♂

I imagine the next mission instructions will have "Remove the lidar protector" printed in large friendly letters.

Fallen over, those winds in Nevada must be extremely strong

I expect this will lead to a serious rethink of lander design in future. A design which can self- right or extend a couple of arms or be capable of some kind of motion or something else. It's an expensive oversight. Maybe if it landed with legs with a brushless motor and wheel on each extended to be drawn in towards the body once it had landed. That would also make it mobile and able to adjust its body height and incline. ?

Even though the cost of this mission is several orders of magnitude less than Surveyor, the technology on board Odysseus is several orders of magnitude more capable than that of Surveyor. That makes me appreciate all the more how daring snd successful Surveyors were for their time almost 60 years ago.

Thank you for explaining about the Eagle Cam. That was our university’s payload, and I was not sure why it didn’t get used as designed.

I obviously can't go into details, but that rangefinder was made where I work. The interlock is a last resort safety switch connected to our lab doors in case someone opens one while the laser is firing. IM did a simply incredible job working around this and coming up with a solution in an hour and a half. Absolutely stunning work from them.

I love how Scott says "Mun"

12:26 "A small lander the size of a big lander"

Maybe the take-away learning here is that all the vehicle safeing mechanisms/interlocks should have some supervisory circuit also present to confirm what state they are in. Ideally, you'd confirm this as part of the payload close-out checklist after each of the "remove before flight" checklist items.

They put man on the moon 50 years ago using atari technology. Now, they can not put a can on the moon, with Ai computing . Bring back the slide rule..

‘Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up”. Should have sent up LIFE ALERT 🚨

Why not make these landers lower and wider instead of tall and narrow? The Apollo landers looked just about right. The Space X lander looks like a guaranteed tip over to me.

Idea for a spacecraft: a ball shape with minimal mechanical systems. Just enough to roll and some retractable antennas

I agree, I hope they get this worked out, and Congratulations to all of the teams involved. But it amazes me how many issues we can have with all the new technology we use today and how much more advanced we are since we landed on the moon so long ago, but we have so much trouble landing now even with fewer funds. The cost should be less. But over all Great Job!

Analysis of the 60s film showing the trajectory of the dust being thrown from the wheels of the rover, proves that footage was taken on the moon. There was no way to fake the trajectory of dust falling in 1/6G back in the 60s.

Got to wonder why they made it tall and narrow. Practically asking for it to tip over. Short and wide with a low centre of gravity would surely be more sensible? As for failing to remove the lockout on the Lidar... I mean we all make mistakes at work but I feel better about mine now...

It's the fault of their top engeneer Ms. Olga Tumbelova.

Boy a lower center of gravity would have been helpful!!

Great stuff helldiver

Not too surprising a 3 meter tall lander with non-extending 2 meter diameter legs fell over.

USA - “What’s a matter Japan, can’t land upright on the Moon? - Here, hold my beer…….”

Maybe design a lander like a weeble so it won't fall down.

So did Aliens take video and pictures of this blotched Moon landing or was it a fake?

Goes to show how good the Apollo landings were. ❤

It is pretty interesting to look at the old 1966 Surveyor documents and see how robustly those probes were built, and how much effort went into testing them. The modern stuff looks much more delicate. There is probably also much less full scale testing possible due to budget constraints.

Does the center of gravity increase/decrease in height with a reduction in gravity, or does it stay the same.

Fantastic video! Thank you for explaining this. You spoke a little about price and the comparatively low cost of this mission which made me wonder; What do you think is the bare-bones cheapest someone could put 'something' (anything) on the moon? Like, not necessarily any 'precious cargo', just something. Anything. Maybe something as basic as a marker, a photograph, or a message on paper or someones name laser etched on an object or a simple camera that sends back a single image (that's probably already way too complex). Like, what is the smallest, simplest, cheapest rocket that could launch something to the moon?

They called it successful landing

Ham radio people for the win! 😉

Phenomenal detail and context Scott

Scott, My friends and I were discussing the movie Contact (from 1997) and how at the end the government said that the signal from Vega was actually man-made from a satellite. We were discussing how you can tell if a signal came from within the solar system or whether it actually came from Vega. We basically concluded that it was impossible for a satellite or probe in the solar system to fake a signal coming from Vega because of the motion of Earth and the parallax from various ground stations looking up at it, radio astronomers would get conflicting answers as to which part of the sky the signal was coming from. My gut says that the longer you need to fake the signal for (hours vs days vs weeks vs months as in the film), the further away your probe needs to be or the more probes you need to use. Any thoughts on this?

When commercial flights happen with public funding, they should be compelled to do these live streams. Don't give them any ideas to share less.

Hi umm is this a stupid question: why is the shape so obviously top heavy? Why not make a shorter, flatter lander??

looking at the early model of this lander its a bit more stumpy ...so perhaps more stable. The final unit was pretty tall. not surprised it tipped over really.

That was a very expensive mistake.

For the non technical, how were they able to do live video in the apollo days but not now? Great vid btw

The problem with commercial space projects is that the primary mission is always to "increase shareholder value.."

If Armstrong was inside, he could just make it straight like the first one.

Not really a landing. It landed on sideways and now lost the ability how long it can transmit pictures. Compare this to Chandrayaan 3 - which is real successful landing , done on a much lower budget

Who would have thought that an object twice as tall as it is wide would be tippy.

And this is why people think we didn't land on the moon

Great summary. Thank you.

Just looking at the tall narrow design... It is no wonder it fell over.

People are so gullible.

And we did this 50 years ago with less technology.....can't even get rovers to land now....they want us to think we had moon cars lol

Hang on… So they didn’t drop a thing they were supposed to drop because of a last minute change and then hit the ground faster than expected? Is it possible they simply forgot to account for the slight increase in mass?

It reminds me of my first succesful Mun landing in KSP. At least I had reaction vheels to get up

We landed humans on the moon 55 years ago. And we can’t put an unmanned spacecraft on the moon in 2024🤔 Seriously you upright indoctrinated walking mammals 😢

So with all our advance technology we pulled this stunt 😅😂😅😂 .... so did we really go to th we moon in 1969 ????? 😅😂😅😂 !!!! What nonsense !!!

14:16 "...bonus point because they are closer to the moon than they otherwise would be..." Blowing coffee out of my nose.🤣

They named it Odysseus, he too crashed. I watched the program with every expectation that, like NASA, there would be video footage of the touchdown…there are no words to describe my disappointment. All this just helped solidify my opposition to these privately funded space missions. The only response I give Space X some wiggle room is because they are aiming for human visitation to Mars

This is the proof Americans have never been to the moon

No live footage of the landing. Totally ridiculous!

Like this even happened at all, I highly doubt it.

4:00 minutes in the video, I can see the lover part of the flame / Exhaust separates (diverges) more quickly than upper part. Anybody know why that is....?

hmmm... I'll go with the A-team with pocket protectors and slide rulers please.

this always happened to me in Kerbal.. just keep holding left or right and it will spin itself back into the air.

It is very interesting that NASA has not developed a middle school level project to support an inverted and overturned vehicle, and lift it up vertically.

Really puzzling that the Apollo program succseeded 6 times in a row (1st attempt a 100% success, even) in 1969-1973? With that tech that was around by then?