For those of you who are interested, and are not QAnon Flat Earthers, Intuitive Machines is looking to make history tomorrow. I believe there will be a streaming event on NASA's YouTube channel (what I am hearing here at the office) around 4pm tomorrow.
They are going to go for landing using an experiment on board with lidar patched in to take over for the main landing lidar that is not working.
Man, I have to say... if they start killing astronauts in this cycle of exploration, it's going to be pretty sad. I'm not sure human beings in this era have access to the same obsessive levels of concentration that they had in the 1960's. Definitely I don't sense the same desperate drive. I hope no lives are lost, but space is really, really hard.
So, did this land as planned or is there a new crater on the moon? Either way I'm happy it's a Houston company to be the first private business to land on the moon
Good thing there are no humans on this lander. I’ve often felt that we’ve played it way too safe regarding space exploration. Going to space is inherently dangerous but if we’re going to become a civilization that is more than just one planet we need to. In some ways I look at human civilization the last 50 years as a lot like the Ming Dynasty of China. There was an age of exploration where the Chinese sent out vast expeditions to as far as Africa. One emperor later China turned very inward and even burned the some of the big expeditionary ships. About 200 years later China was backward and corrupt when compared to the “barbarian” countries of Europe and even Japan which had once been a vassal of China participated in carving up the once mighty empire. On a rambling side note season 4 of For All Mankind deals with the tension of looking inward or continuing to develop and explore space.
