Odysseus has less than a day left on the Moon before it freezes to death::So what are we to make of this? Is Odysseus a success or a failure?
Crash Landed on its head (I always though the design looked built to spill anyway), sent no images, I don’t believe we gained any scientific data (please correct me if I missed something on that front though), and froze to death in a week. This would all be a nice try and some learning progress if it was 1971 perhaps, but this goes in the failure book for sure. Not to say that failure = useless / bad. But let’s save the champagne success story for a company that gets it right.
It’s very good and learning progress for the 20s too. In the last 5 years for lunar lander missions we’ve had 6 outright failures, 2 successes, and this is the second “mixed success”
When nobody in your country does something for decades and then a different group of people try doing it in different ways, they’re largely starting from scratch.
sent no images
If you check the comments on Ars Technica, someone reposted an image that’s supposed to have come from the lander (it’s an uncorrected shot through a fisheye lens, though). Given that the link with Odysseus is apparently barely faster than an acoustic-coupler modem, I’m not expecting much more.
Failure. Just as the Japanese one that was labeled a failure by the western news just weeks before that did the exact same thing. Articles were even published saying after japan’s failure, the US could be the first to land successfully on the moon in so many decades. And it didn’t so its a failure.
Japan’s lander met all of their own internal criteria for being considered a success. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s at least partially true for this lander as well. This thing was absurdly inexpensive relative to previous projects, IIRC.
I would agree that the Japanese lander was a success. But I refuse to enable western hypocrisy that labels the exact same actions by two different stages in opposing viewpoints just for propaganda.
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.
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
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)
Capitalism is all about efficiency. An efficient total loss is somehow a win!
That might be the case right? Let’s say there a percentage chance that would have succeeded call it 10%
Now your first attempt fails, maybe because of some miscalculation or lack of engineering precision
Even if the older way more expensive version had a 100% success rate you’d probably still rather the cheaper version right?
Also not sure how this is about capitalism, replace the above for material cost and it’s the same thing
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.
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.
Failure. Both that and the Japanese probe made it to the moon. Odysseus was able to phone home briefly before its mission failed. The Japanese probe had Rovers successfully detach and return a picture of the failed landing
This was not a success. With that said it doesn’t mean there weren’t good things, from what I read they did a whole lot of things well. People seem to be unable to understand they can coexist.
