That one engineer: You never specified orientation after touchdown.

2024 is the Year of Sideways Moon Landers! 😂

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.

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

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.

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.

Glad the side with the artwork related to nfts was covered

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

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

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

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!!!

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.

Japan needs royalties on the "landing on the side" patent...

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.

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.

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

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.

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. 😎👍

Phenomenal detail and context Scott

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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. 🤦🏻‍♂

Great summary. Thank you.

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?

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

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.

Great stuff helldiver

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

Goes to show how good the Apollo landings were. ❤

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 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. ?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

@scottmanley Off topic, but had to ask: what are the crosses on NASA Moon landing mission photographs used? Thank you!

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.

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.

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?

Great vid

They called it successful landing

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

This is the proof Americans have never been to the moon

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

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

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

Big fan . Love your work. Shoot the moon. Would it be posable to go straight up , like jeffs ride, but go straight up out in to the space. Timed to meet the moon. And then just do the landing as normal but lower gravity. Wouldn't it be the same as landing like jeffs ride but over there? Id be interested in your thoughts.

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....?

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

I’m just glad we are thinking about the Mün again 😉

Thanks!

I would think they could spin up some of the gyroscopes, establish some stable axes to push against then flip it to an upright orientation. Just like a spinning top.

Fallen over, those winds in Nevada must be extremely strong

This man is a legend! He should be called Jack precision

I love how Scott says "Mun"

Yeah, this is a bummer. Major bummer.

Why did they cut away right when it was about touch down in the test flight? 🧐

I was not surprised when I heard it landed sideways..I was watching the live stream..the last information available before it went silent for a while it was reported at 8 degrees bank..still quite a feat for private company😊

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

16:31 Also, when you actually have a trained person inside the lunar lander, whose life literally depends on it, and who can see, react and make adjustments according to what is going on, it is in some ways easier to make a success out of it.

Okay question. What's the possibility of using the attitude thrusters to put that thing back on its feet?

So I get that a remote operation like this is hard but would some lateral movement during landing be anticipated and a plan to correct be part of the programming?

This was a really large step. What if you could invent the ability for a lander to get back on its feet again? Like a lever that pushes out on it's side and sets it back upright. Idk, just a thought.

13:02 Ah, that explains a lot.

What happened to the guy that forgot about the switch?? Don’t they have some sort of checklist?

Did anyone else see see the camera covered by nondescript yellow-brown tape with "Remove Before Flight" sharpied on it and think "I bet the lidar array had the same kind of deal"? There's a reason remove before flight tags are red.

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?

You're right Scott, they aren't required to show any telemetry etc. However, as SpaceX has shown, the more you engage the public in what you're doing, the better it is for business. An own goal to not spend some time and effort on such a thing.

Hell yeah! Kerbal space proggram referance!! Il admit that picturng this game really helps visualise theese missions, tipping over on the mun is the worst thing ever😅

One would think that if you were designing a robot to make an extraterrestrial landing, they would have made the craft short and squat. It would have made a more stable platform for remote autonomous landings on an unknown surface. Odysseus seems to have been built too thin and tall. I think that its height and high CG contributed to its falling over on landing.

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..

I am, by no stretch of the imagination an expert! Getting to the moon with all the calculations needed and the maneuvers required is a great achievement. The amount of calculations that the computer has to do is enormous. I do have one comment thought. When Niel Armstrong did it, he made sure that his craft was stationary before he allowed the final few feet of decent. He landed so softly that the 2 probes at the bottom of the LEM did not protrude into the lunar surface. I was a bit surprised that the new lander was still traveling 2 miles an hour in the horizontal direction so when it contacted the lunar surface it fell over. Just imagine walking slowly and having your slipper slide off your foot. You could fall over. I am very surprised that they did not think of this when programming the last few seconds of the flight. Everything went great for a whole week and at the end “BOOM!” Maybe next time there would be a bit more simulator testing before so much money was spent to have a vehicle fall over at the end. All I can say is “GOOD LUCK” in your next flight. I hope a bit more care and time is put into simulated trips like this.

Fine work fine work.

Why wasn't Help Desk notified?

I've played enough Kerbal to be painfully familiar with this issue. Lol. I'm sure there are very good reasons for this, but I wonder why not every lander has some built-in self-righting mechanism, considering how incredibly easy it is to screw up such a landing. I know there are a lot of robots with self-righting capabilities, and many shapes that work the same way. I would've assumed that there would be standard issue for most landers by now. Knowing how well-planned such missions are makes me think they have very good reasons to not do that, but I can't imagine what those reasons could be.

We need more footage

Soft-landing accomplished, great job IM.

Always the best explanation❤

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

That seems to be a trend over there!

I'm always amazed when my Kerbal Space Program play events get confirmed by real life.

Pretty sure it’s a marvel. I know I couldn’t do it, so great job guys and gals.