9 mo. ago • 97%

Privately built lunar lander makes history with successful moon touchdown

www.nbcnews.com Privately built lunar lander makes history with successful moon touchdown

The lander, built by Intuitive Machines, touched down on the lunar surface at around 6:24 p.m. ET, overcoming a late-stage glitch with its onboard laser instruments.

Technology @lemmy.world Privately built lunar lander makes history with successful moon touchdown

47 comments

I work in the space industry. I feel like I should be celebrating this, but I just find it hard to be enthusiastic about the commercialization of space.

I didn't get into this to build hotels, and mine asteroids. I feel like as a species we should continue to explore, and push the boundaries.

I just can't get behind private industry on the moon. This is a bad move for humanity overall.

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- I feel like asteroid mining should be a good thing. We would be able to get the resources we need without sacrificing our planet. I don't feel like that's feasible under capitalism.
  
  19
- Space is expensive, and never gets the attention it deserves. Only a handful of countries could do much space exploration and as they try to explore more it rapidly gets more expensive, longer timeframe. We need to face that from a societal perspective it just doesn’t scale.
  
  Commercializing space doesn’t just mean silly things like orbital hotels, but it means more, better, cheaper access to space and space resources. It means distributing efforts for better scalability. It means multiple funding sources so we’re less dependent on the whims f politicians. It means someone else can take care of the “easy” stuff, so NASA/ESA/JSA/CSA/ASA/etc can focus on the bigger challenges of exploration.
  
  More international cooperation is also a huge part of this. We need to continue the model of cooperation from ISS, so we can all build on each other’s efforts, and reach out into the solar system as “humanity”
  
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  You do realize these "commercial companies" such as SpaceX are funded by government contracts right? You're not telling me anything I don't already know. And you're also not going to change my opinion. Space isn't meant to be the next capitalist playground, which is what we are trying to do.
  
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- Space, the final frontier. trumpet music These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, on a mission to explore strange new markets, to seek out new profits and new business opportunities, to boldly trade where no one has traded before. doot DOOOOOOOT
  
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  Home is where the heart is, but the stars are made of latinum. -- 75th Rule of Acquisition
  
  2
- 1,000% agree with you. What will the first Applebee's on the moon serve?
  
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  Artisanal, locally sourced, organic cheese.
  
  19
- While I agree, isn't the end goal setting up a base on the moon?Hopefully it will be science first and tourism later. I wish I could just fast forward to star trek time :)
  
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  Probably, and as much as I love the science fiction of space travel, real life me isn't so into have space truckers hauling dorritos to the moon.
  
  This stuff creates environmental damage, tons of space debris, and the more activity there is in near earth orbits, the more possibility there is for conjunctions, which means moving your satellite and wasting fuel. It's just not that smart.
  
  But we're gonna do it anyway.
  
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  Mid-term goal is to have a base near the moon to use as a staging point for interplanetary trips.
  
  4
- I hear you, brother. Same situation, same feelings about this :/
  
  8
- Hotels would be just a vanity thing, but we would(could?) collectively benefit from mining asteroids and having industrial construction capabilities in space would make space exploration and space based energy collection easier.
  
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- The Cold War fueled space exploration up to the point political support waned. It would be nice to see another space race to foster competition and technological advancement, hopefully without the Mutually Assured Destruction this time around.
  
  Private industry is going to fill the void of a politically unpopular public space program, which is a shame.
  
  6
- It's not very reassuring that the last attempt crashed and burned, then NASA had to come in with the save on the landing for this one (the lander's laser landing guidance failed, and NASA jumped in with "don't worry, we brought one too just in case"
  
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  It's probably a joint effort anyway, they almost always are.
  
  3
- My hope is maybe eventually that gets us to the point ordinary losers like me can take a vacation pretending to be the astronaut I never became.
  
  Because otherwise I'll never into space.
  
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Just waiting to see if it landed upright and we can get some pictures!

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- That third-person camera they were talking about sounds really bad-ass. I'm hoping for some pictures too!!
  
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  What'd a second-person perspective camera look like?
  
  6
- And then the extra point.
  
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"The lunar lander was privately built thanks to decades of public research and development and public funding (in the form of wage theft / tax evasion) which allowed the company to have enough capital to design and build the lander"

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While I find the news generally exciting, damn was that a weird live stream. It all felt very anticlimactic.

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- we're spoiled by spacex. this looked like an snl skit.
  
  5
- Same. Weird there was no video just the control room
  
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- We’re going to need some better communication systems for Artemis; on the other hand there will be humans on board who can monitor the communication uplink and adjust it as needed.
  
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