going boldly where a few very old but mostly dead men have been before on live television. Really inspiring the next generation here.
I saw a podcast that said it could've been worse because the lidar tool they use to calculate landing distances was stuck on testing mode. It was by lucky circumstance that they found out before landing and it took around two hours to rejigger a working alternative with a different lidar scanner. Because of that workaround, they lost the ability to use an external camera to film the lander. The tilted landing itself was I think from an atmospheric miscalculation. I forgot the details already... Maybe they pick a bunch of alphabets in the astronaut candidate pool and everything magically works itself out.
NPR said the laser guiding tool wasn’t “stuck in test mode”, but rather ground grew just forgot to turn it on. WTF But they got lucky bc NASA had test lasers onboard as part of a paid experiment Intuitive Machines almost failed, too. Ground teams did not turn on the switch for the lander's navigating lasers before the Feb. 15 liftoff from Florida. The oversight was not discovered until Odysseus was circling the moon, forcing flight controllers to rely on a NASA laser-navigating device that was on board merely as an experiment. As it turned out, NASA's test lasers guided Odysseus to a close to bull's-eye landing, resulting in the first moon landing by a U.S. spacecraft since the Apollo program.
Well, **** you, Raymond Floyd. I watched the sequel, 2010, recently and it's pretty great, better than I remembered.
