It's Almost Replay Day

It was a day with a pair of important missions to follow.  First, was the attempt to land the second US-built lander on the moon, Intuitive Machines IM-2 or Athena.  It's worth pointing out this is the second lunar landing in this week alone.  (It's also trivia worth mentioning that both Firefly Aerospace, the makers of Blue Ghost, and Intuitive Machines are located in Texas).  Second was SpaceX's Starship Test Flight, TF-8.  

In the overall big picture sense, both of them were better than their previous milestones but neither one was perfect or even far better than the previous.  More like a replay than a big improvement.  In the first case, that would be Intuitive Machines' IM-1 last year.  In the second, the comparison would be to January's Test Flight 7. 

To borrow a phrase, today's missions weren't exactly the same as the comparison missions but they rhymed.  

In the first case, IM-2, like IM-1 (Odysseus) last year, apparently landed awkwardly.  Watching the NASA/IM video coverage in real time, the mission controllers didn't seem to know that the probe had landed when it was supposed to have.  By the time they terminated the coverage, a half hour after the scheduled landing time, we had a mixed bag of information.  Things like the engine is running (after it was supposed to have landed) then it wasn't running.  The fuel wasn't where they expected it in the tank.  

Beyond that, Crain and the rest of the company, including its chief executive Steve Altemus, could not precisely say what happened. After Athena landed, the engineers in mission control could talk to the spacecraft, and they were able to generate some power from its solar arrays. But precisely where it was, or how it lay on the ground, they could not say a few hours later.

Mission controllers could communicate with the payloads and it sounded like it was all working pretty well, they just didn't know if it was standing up closer to vertical or if it was like Odysseus last year.  Something never explained was keeping them from taking photos and sending them back to Earth.  That can affect all operations, especially big payloads like NASA’s Polar Resource Ice Mining Experiment (PRIME) and the drill from Honeybee Robotics.

In the second case, today's Starship TF-8 started out like January's TF-7.  In that mission, we saw the booster return to Boca Chica and be captured in mid-air, but at about the time that was happening, the Ship was exploding.  Today we saw the booster return to the launch tower and be captured by the chopsticks, and I made note of the display of the status of the six engines on Starship.  This was almost exactly seven minutes after liftoff.  All six of them were in great shape while by that time in TF-7 they were shutting down. 

Note the time in the bottom right panel 8:08, so essentially one minute after the booster capture.  You can see the two vacuum Raptors (big circles) on the left side of the engine pattern are still on but the three, smaller diameter, ground Raptors have shut down.  A few seconds after this screen capture, they were all off.

As the NASASpaceflight guys were going through the video, one of the guys noticed this. Look at the time in this view, 19 seconds before the one above. 

There are more signs of things going seriously wrong in this view.  Now look at the red circle just left of the time.  That bright spot isn't there seconds before this.  The NASA Spaceflight techy guy thinks this the engine getting burned through from the inside.

There's more.  It's hard to see well in this photo but there's an orange mist above the engine on the right with a light blueish-gray mist above that and above the curve that marks the edge of the Starship's body.  He thinks this is raw open fire in the engine compartment.  Which is pretty much what caused FT-7's RUD.  Clearly, the work that SpaceX did to fix Starship wasn't enough.  It delayed the RUD from around the same time as the booster capture, which is close to seven minutes, for around one more minute.  Delaying it two or three minutes instead of one might have saved the mission.

Two missions like these in one day is unusual. They mostly underline the old cliche that space is hard.

 

UPDATE 3/7 at 10:00 AM to add:

Intuitive Machines updated this morning to add that the mission is over:

Images downlinked from Athena on the lunar surface confirmed that Athena was on her side. After landing, mission controllers were able to accelerate several program and payload milestones, including NASA’s PRIME-1 suite, before the lander’s batteries depleted.

With the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge. The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission.