Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Nikki Haley, who can’t acknowledge ‘slavery’, is a pathetic shill.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

So many bastards, so little time.

“woke” is the new caravan.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Bark louder, little dog.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

It’s a doggy dog world.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

ha ha ha! Nice try weird people.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Motown is Joe-Town!

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Joe Biden can go out like FDR, not by dying in office, but by crushing the fascists.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Live: Intuitive Machines-1 Lunar Landing

Live: Intuitive Machines-1 Lunar Landing

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ETA from NASA:

UPDATE: The @Int_Machines ‘ lunar lander will orbit the Moon one additional time before landing on the surface. Touchdown is now targeted for 6:24pm ET (2324 UTC). Our live coverage will begin at 5pm EST (2200 UTC). go.nasa.gov/49LQU1k

 

Some days I like it when I’m in the home office all day. Then I catch stuff like this:

NASA science is set to land on the Moon aboard Odysseus, Intuitive Machines’ uncrewed autonomous lander. Touchdown is targeted for 4:24 p.m. EST (2124 UTC) Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024. The NASA payloads aboard the lander aim to help us learn more about terrain and communications near the lunar South Pole. For more information about our Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, visit: https://go.nasa.gov/3RFR0A5

I caught it because I stumbled on this:

Live: Intuitive Machines-1 Lunar Landing

I felt this…although I did know in the back of my brain it was happening some time, just didn’t realize it was today.

NOTE: It looks like it has been delayed, so I pulled the post and pushed it an hour so you weren’t just watching a clock tick down

Otherwise this is an open thread.

Reader Interactions

63Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    Other space news

    NASA engineers rally to save voyager 1, the icon of space exploration
    The team is tackling an issue with one of Voyager 1’s onboard computers, the flight data system, which is stopping it from transmitting data

  2. 2.

    Raoul Paste

    V-GER?   Better resurrect that Star Trek movie.  You wouldn’t want that computer to go whacko.

  5. 5.

    Fake Irishman

    One of my colleague’s spouse is in charge of one of the payloads on Odyssey. It’s been an exciting and stressful week for him.

  6. 6.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud: ​
     

    Voyager 1 is 15 billion miles away from the Earth. That they can even attempt to restore communications over that vast gulf amazes me.

    If I’ve done the arithmetic correctly, it takes over 22 hours for signals to travel from here to Voyager, or vice versa. Any time the NASA techs working on this send Voyager a signal, they’ve got to wait nearly two days to see if there’s any response.

    That would drive me batty.

  10. 10.

    CaseyL

    Thanks for putting this up! I made a mental note to keep track of the landing and, like most of my mental notes, it flew away in a mental breeze.

  11. 11.

    JWR

    NBC News just said they went for one additional orbit, so the landing has been pushed to 3:24 (PST)

    ETA wherever you are, 12 minutes from right… now!

  12. 12.

    raven

    I was in Sydney for the first moon landing and the Aussie’s we really into it because they had a tracking station.  I’ve posted this before but it never gets old.

    The Dish

  14. 14.

    SpaceUnit

    I occasionally entertain myself with the possibility that NASA could have conducted moon missions with the shuttle if they’d been so inclined.

    Store the necessary fuel, oxygen, equipment and supplies in earth orbit via an advance team.  Assemble it all onto a frame constructed of something like aluminum theatrical truss.  Attach it to the bottom of the eventual mission shuttle and off you go.

    Doesn’t need to be elegant or aerodynamic.  And it’s not like driving cross-country where you need to keep your foot on the gas the whole way.

    It’s probably crazy, but it’s something I wonder about from time to time.  I’m a true space unit.

  17. 17.

    JWR

    NBC just went live for the landing. Let’s hope it doesn’t experience a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” on the way down.

  18. 18.

    dmsilev

    @SpaceUnit: The Shuttle would have been a pretty bad vehicle for Moon missions. There’d be a huge amount of extra weight in the wings and all of that which would need to be lugged to and from the Moon. That’s a lot of extra fuel.

  19. 19.

    SpaceUnit

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    I always thought it was very strange that the country would devote such resources and urgency toward getting to the moon only to quit before the program was complete.

    Part of me wants to think NASA just came up with a better way, but I know it sounds pretty crazy.

  20. 20.

    CaseyL

    Nail-biting time: communications interruption keeps mission control from knowing what’s going on.

  24. 24.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Dear Nasa,

    From now on can you put payloads on rocket launches by companies with a proven record of delivering payloads where they are supposed to go, in one piece?

    Just a thought, OHB.

  25. 25.

    Bill Arnold

    I’m enjoying the terminology. Just heard them use “roll excursion”. They weren’t upset though.

  27. 27.

    CaseyL

    I deeply appreciate how telescopes all over the world are looking for the lander, or the lander’s signal, right now.

  28. 28.

    SpaceUnit

    @dmsilev:

    Fair point.  And I don’t have the math, physics and engineering chops to suss it all out.  It’s just an idea I toy with now and then.

    ETA:  And again it seems odd that NASA would wrap up Apollo 17 and suddenly say, “You know what?  Nevermind!”

  39. 39.

    Matt McIrvin

    @SpaceUnit: The motive for the people controlling the money wasn’t scientific exploration or the poetry of spaceflight or anything like that, it was beating the USSR to a finish line to secure a propaganda win. As far as they were concerned there was little reason to continue the program past Apollo 11.

  41. 41.

    bjacques

    @eclare: I’ve seen both! My girlfriend is from Melbourne, so it was only a matter of time.

    This goes straight into the Billiard Room!

    heh. The American character was The Tick and Samson from The Venture Bros, apparently.

  46. 46.

    SpaceUnit

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Yeah.  But I still thought it was a shame at the time.

    Now, of course, the last thing I want is to see is Elon Musk prancing his ugly ass around on the surface of the Moon.

  48. 48.

    Matt McIrvin

    @SpaceUnit: It’s important to keep in mind that the program was *not* broadly popular– it was extremely expensive and happening at a time when trust in institutions was eroding, there was an unpopular war on, much civil unrest, etc.

  50. 50.

    Matt McIrvin

    @SpaceUnit: It makes no sense to spend all the fuel to haul the Shuttle’s bits that are useless for the Moon all the way there and back. For a Shuttle-based Moon program it might be more sensible to haul up a landing vehicle and fuel *that* at the orbital depot. The Shuttle could bring a large mass of samples back down; that kind of thing was its unique strength.

  51. 51.

    Bill Arnold

    @SpaceUnit:

    Elon Musk prancing his ugly ass around on the surface of the Moon.

    This was not Musk’s project, though.
    (“Prancing” on the moon (1/6 earth gravity) would be pretty odd, TBH, imagining it.)

  52. 52.

    Wave Function Collapse

    @lowtechcyclist:

    FWIW, 15 billion miles is only 160 AU or so. That is about 1/6th of the way to the aphelion of Sedna — one of the many Pluto-like worlds discovered in the last few decades that got Pluto demoted.

    My apologies for the pedantry.

  53. 53.

    SpaceUnit

    Fine.  You guys have convinced me to not commandeer a space shuttle and attempt to fly it to the Moon.  I hope you’re all happy.

     

    I never get to have any fun.

  54. 54.

    misterpuff

    @Bill Arnold:
    Giant steps are what you take
    Walking on the moon
    I hope my leg don’t break
    Walking on the moon
    We could walk forever
    Walking on the moon
    We could be together
    Walking on, walking on the moon

    Walking back from your house
    Walking on the moon
    Walking back from your house
    Walking on the moon
    Feet, they hardly touch the ground
    Walking on the moon
    My feet don’t hardly make no sound
    Walking on, walking on the moon

    Imagine going from Musk to Sting in one jump…..

  55. 55.

    counterfactual

    @OzarkHillbilly: If they knew of one, they’d use it. And if you ask NASA to be absolutely sure something will work, it will cost billions and take a minimum of ten years. If you want cheaper and faster, you have to take risks.

  58. 58.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @OzarkHillbilly: ​

    Dear Nasa,From now on can you put payloads on rocket launches by companies with a proven record of delivering payloads where they are supposed to go, in one piece?Just a thought, OHB.

    Great thought. Don’t look now, but – That would be SpaceX whose Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules have a long history of successful orbital deliveries .Starship is, by way of contrast, an audacious rapid-prototyping effort to develop the most powerful and capable orbital rocketry that’s also fully reusable. Google “Soviet N-1” for the sort of disaster that lies in wait for multi-engine boosters, and reflect on the fact that SpaceX managed a full burn of all 33 Raptors on the Superheavy first stage on just its second flight.​

    (ETA: I don’t care for Lone Skum’s attitude or politics any more than most of yinz do, but if Starship manages a near-orbital flight where nothing significant goes wrong in the next 3 or 4 tries it will be a rousingly successful development campaign. And a damn good thing for the future of operations in space.)​

  59. 59.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Matt McIrvin:

    The motive for the people controlling the money wasn’t scientific exploration or the poetry of spaceflight or anything like that, it was beating the USSR to a finish line to secure a propaganda win. As far as they were concerned there was little reason to continue the program past Apollo 11.

    As a spinoff of that, there was a lot of “why are we wasting all this money on more Apollo missions when there are so many problems to deal with here on Earth?” going on.  (Not that I think that makes any sense, but it was a very prevalent attitude at the beginning of the 1970s.)

    But that was based on what you were saying: people in America (not just the people controlling the money, but rather pretty much everyone) understood that the whole point was to win the ‘space race’ against the Russians. We’d been embarrassed by Sputnik, and then by Yuri Gagarin, and it wasn’t gonna happen again, dammit.

    So when we’d won the race to the moon, and it was clearly a durable, lasting win – Russians were waaaay behind us on some pretty essential stuff, like rendezvous and docking – the “we need to be spending that money down here” argument had some power to it, regardless of the logic or lack of it.

  60. 60.

    wjca

    @Uncle Cosmo: ETA: I don’t care for Lone Skum’s attitude or politics any more than most of yinz do, but if Starship manages a near-orbital flight where nothing significant goes wrong in the next 3 or 4 tries it will be a rousingly successful development campaign.

    Sounds like reason to be thankful that he’s focusing on screwing up xitter, with a side helping of trashing Tesla.  Keeps him distracted, while SpaceX gets on with business.

  61. 61.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @lowtechcyclist: [T]he “we need to be spending that money down here” argument had some power to it, regardless of the logic or lack of it.

    Yeah – about as much “lack of logic” as We need to stop wasting money giving Ukraine military hardware when etc etc etc, which conveniently overlooks the fact that >90% of US military assistance is spent (and provides employment) in the US itself and supports the US economy and the government through  associated taxation.

  62. 62.

    wjca

    @lowtechcyclist: there was a lot of “why are we wasting all this money on more Apollo missions when there are so many problems to deal with here on Earth?” going on.  (Not that I think that makes any sense, but it was a very prevalent attitude at the beginning of the 1970s.)

    It’s like they thought that the NASA budget was just firing masses of dollar bills into space.  Sort of like how some people visualize aid to Ukraine as pallets of dollars being sent.  Then it was idiots on the left; now it’s (mostly) idiots on the right.  But it’s the same idiocy.

    EDT Aaaaand Uncle Cosmo beat me to it.

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