I guess we can call it official now. Intuitive Machines has announced that their lander Odysseus - which they quickly nicknamed Odie - has failed to awaken after the frigid lunar night and declared an end to the mission.
"Intuitive Machines started listening for Odie's wake-up signal on March 20, when we projected enough sunlight would potentially charge the lander's power system and turn on its radio," the Houston-based company said in a post on X on Saturday (March 23).
"As of March 23rd at 1030 A.M. Central Standard Time, flight controllers decided their projections were correct, and Odie's power system would not complete another call home. This confirms that Odie has permanently faded after cementing its legacy into history as the first commercial lunar lander to land on the moon," Intuitive Machines added in another Saturday post.
The probe landed on the moon February 22nd, and it was obvious from the start that things weren't ideal but it took another couple of days before it was understood what happened. As Ars Technica put it, "that moment when you land on the Moon, break a leg, and are about to topple over."
Odysseus took this selfie while passing over the near side of the Moon, after lunar orbit insertion on February 21. Image credit: Intuitive Machines
As an aside, I can't tell you how many naysayers I've read saying that since Odie tipped over, we shouldn't consider it a successful landing on the moon. Since virtually every payload that could radio back to Earth did, which means every paying customer was satisfied, I think it's making a bigger deal out of falling over than it deserves to be.
The Payload news site has an interesting story about an aspect of this mission that hasn't been talked about much. Intuitive Machines' value has jumped dramatically.
Intuitive Machines reported $4.5M of cash on hand at the end of 2023, but that balance ballooned to $54.6M by March 1 when an institutional investor exercised their stock warrants after the company’s soft-but-toppled-over lunar landing in February.
The company’s current cash balance is its largest since SPAC’ing last year, providing much-needed short-term breathing room.
They go on to report that the company reported their annual revenue of $79.5M in 2023 as it ticked off milestones for its three NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) lander contracts and began recognizing revenue from its OMES III NASA engineering contract. The company’s Q1 sales will be bolstered by a near-total IM-1 lunar landing success, as it was able to transmit data from almost all payloads aboard.
It was desperately needed as they burned through $75M of cash last year.
IM has two more of its NASA CLPS contracts (Commercial Lunar Payload Services)
ahead of it. The second lander mission, IM-2, has been penciled in
toward the end of this year, and another for next year. The CLPS
contracts are generally fixed price and small amounts compared to NASA's own
programs, which ends up being good for NASA but tough on the contractors. The
contractor bears all the risk. We can probably expect them to do a bunch of changes to IM-2, both design and procedures, because of the "lessons learned" during IM-1 and the mission may slip out later because of that.
You can jolly well bet that the procedures to enable ALL the onboard landing subsystems will be checked, checked, and checked again! That was a colossal screw-up that will not be repeated. Instead, something else will screw up...
ReplyDeleteMurphy sayeth so. Don't argue with Murphy.
But that costs MONEY.
DeleteDo not bet on that level of checking being done.
In the words of Han Solo, "don't get cocky, kid!" Their biggest risk is getting too cocky and not thinking of how badly they screwed up in places versus the urgent fixes that got their overall success.
DeleteOf course, we don't know what's going on inside the company, if the one who left the safety on the laser altimeter is even still with them, or if the procedures already called for removing the "Remove Before Flight" warning sticker (I'm assuming they had one).
Murphy's law, though, is as dependable and unbreakable as Newton's, Ohm's, or any law of physics.
Looks like a large leap in capabilities for those guys, to me anyways. So many unknowns you cant anticipate beforehand, all things considered they actually did it, landed and all went wring was one of the spindly looking landing legs got bent and the vehicle simply tipped over. Sucks it ruined the mission but its a pretty simple tech issue. Might be better to employ some form of landing bag, big soft fuzzy pad like, compensate for poor landing aspect or geological feature.
ReplyDeleteHey was watching the 3rd superheavy launch, got a notion it looks to me they have fuel slosh issues in both vehicles.
It seems to me watching, oarticularly how the booster was acting, fuel slosh may be causing roll and pitch problems where the gas thrusters and grid fins are unable to compensate rapidly enough, and or software needs something to cause counteracting thrust vectors which get ahead of the pendulum effect as fuel is rapidly going from side to side. It just looks like on film especially with a quantity of fuel wallowing around at one end, acting like a pendulum. See same effects in over the road tanker trucks/trailers, which most have baffle plates which drastically reduce sloshing. I know cause i've worked as a wekder at two fab shops building OTR tanks. Trailer tanks because they are relatively longer than tandem axle trucks usually get at least three baffle plates, short tandems one and longest legal length tandems they put in two baffles. Even with baffles you can feel the cargo sloshing, like when braking and hard turns. May be thats all its needed for super heavy. Say this cause SpaceX produced a couple camera shots from inside the propellant tanks, lot of very fast sloshing is clearly visible. This rocket is so large whats left for burn back etc use its still a lot of weight. And the fuel left is separated by rather large distances, and how that increases pendulum effect as each load acts differently causing all sorts of torque loads in different directions, which each change rapidly as fuel moves. Even one baffle near the bottom of each propellant tank might help a lot.
I don't have any particular piece of evidence, but I've been thinking about the slosh effects, too. Maybe only in the Super Heavy booster, but as part of the whole picture.
DeleteThe designers have to be aware of it, but this ship is massively bigger than Falcon 9 and bigger than anything ever flown, so maybe it's being overlooked, or the things they do on smaller rockets don't scale up well.
On Starship, the thing that stands out to me is how in the videos when it first got to orbital velocity you can see what appears to be a lot of venting going on. I can't tell if the venting caused the rolling or loss of attitude control, but the fact that it didn't correct the rolling is a bit concerning.
SiG, Anon, fuel slosh is a known problem, it killed IFT2 booster relight during hot-staging. One thing that is going to be WELL analyzed is the control algorithms for proper control of roll/pitch/yaw and ullage burns. The control loops have to be critically damped, under- or over-shoot will most certainly cause loss of control (due to oscillations) such that the booster and/or Starship cannot recover due to limited control authority. It's not a simple problem. I suspect the system was "hunting" and things got out of hand. IF they *did* decide to go Barbecue Roll mode on Starship, either they had valve problems or other control system problems (including software) that is definitely going to be have to be tweaked. Design, build, launch, analyze, fix/redesign, repeat until you either run out of money or you solve the problem(s) - which is exactly what SpaceX is doing... imagine that!
DeleteSomewhat/maybe off topic:
ReplyDeleteI noticed while getting my tri-weekly infusion (y' have a tendency to get hypnotized sitting there for 3½ hrs) that they switched the fluid container: what used to be a sterilized glass bottle is now a polyethylene(?) bag in which the liquid doesn't slosh around on the frequent trips to equalize the body's fluid content.
The containerized fluid is now "held tightly in place" by the vacuum created by the loss of infusion fluid.
I wonder ...
Instead of " 'held tightly in place,' by the vacuum created by the loss of infusion fluid." I suspect it's held tightly in place by the air outside the bag. Pressure differential. As well as the gravity pulling the fluid to the bottom of the bag, too.
DeleteOK! so control the rate of flow with rollers (or the equivalent) on either side of the bag - if sloshing is (one of) the problem/culprit(s).
DeleteBTW: is it the rocket or the fuel that's sloshed?