It's fascinating how the pictures have that "Apollo moon landing" look. I'd always assumed that a huge part of this was just 1960s technology (film not digital etc), but apparently it's actually coming from the literally unearthly lighting conditions of being on the Moon.
that's a great point about the lighting... it really does contribute to that distinctive look. i've also read that the lack of atmosphere on the moon sharpens the shadows and increases the contrast, which probably adds to that effect.
Still photography has gotten more convenient since then, but in the agreeable lighting and atmospheric conditions one would encounter while taking a vacation snap outside at noon Cynthian time, image quality now isn't better than then*
OP is comparing photography tech that made it to the Moon, so not cheap tech. The "special" way the photos look like is probably more a product of the environment than just the equipment.
I am no expert, but to my knowledge the space flight tech evolves very slowly, if at all. One reason for that is that modern tech is supposedly too sensitive to radiation. So you want to balance what's worthwhile to upgrade, and fancy videos are probably low on that list.
The paper is 12 years old. If there haven't been other methods to evaluate modern commercial tech, then it's an actual proof of tech evolving slowly due to radiation concerns. Even the process pointed out in the paper requires resources, but it just got a bit faster in the last years.
Apart from that, adding new components is also costly. You just don't order a random megapixel camera from alibaba and slam it on your 1bn space project.
Considering I made clear that i am no expert and my claims were under that context your response was simply arrogant and not helpful.
Well, you were the one telling me "space tech evolves slowly", when Apollo was taking their pictures with a film coconut, Firefly is using a digital apple, and yet the output still looks eerily similar.
Once SpaceX gets Starship launching weekly, it'll probably be cheaper to send a bot with a camera to the moon than to rent a sound stage and build a big set!
These pictures are great - maybe it's time for me to get a new desktop background.
Kinda related: some years ago NASA published all the Apollo missions pictures. I downloaded all of them (hundreds, maybe bit more), acting as a photo editor then I selected "good ones", cropped them to 16:10 format and made a background picture pack - I'm using it on all my devices since then. If someone is interested, they're published at [0] - feel free to use.
This is an interesting tangent. Is it Flickr's copyright rules that make it attractive? Or, something else? Lack of existing competitors? Not associated with a social media account?
How are the videos captured or processed? The solar lens flares are smoothly interpolated but the moon surface shows lower FPS, almost feels like the flares were on a separate layer.
My guess: they are the same update rate. The lens flares have blurrier edges and move less across the screen. This makes the jumps less obvious.
CGI animations also add blurring, and even your eyes have an integration time that will make fast moving objects blurry. So your brain good at interpolating blurry edges.
- Wow but the moon is 3D. Like, when we see shots of Earth, the ground always looks so flat, but the depth of the craters and the heights of the ridges is really, really amazing to see
- ...KSP did a really good job mimicking the real thing
I noticed this too. Something about the perspective is unnerving, like an amusement park ride. You can see clearly that the moon is small, the craters are big, and the orbiting spacecraft is moving really really fast, all at the same time. None of that is apparent from video of low Earth orbit. And then the stark lighting makes it feel even more bizarre and alien.
The most 3-D experience that I have had with the moon, on the cheap, is when its not in it's full phase. With a cheap telescope, when you observe the edge of the partial-phase moon's crescent, you see the "terminator." It suddenly feels so different, finally you see the moon's bumpy spherical nature. It's like you are flying just above it.
> The terminator is where you'll see the most pronounced shadows cast by the lunar features like craters, mountains, and valleys. This is because the Sun is at a low angle relative to the lunar surface, emphasizing the topography and allowing you to see craters and other features in sharp relief
> - ...KSP did a really good job mimicking the real thing
The pic with the shadow of the lander is really close to what you get out of KSP when you first land on Mun or Minmus. Really really cool. Congrats to everyone who made this happen!
One of the coolest things ever is you can see the shadows and depths of the craters on the moon from here on Earth, with a cheap ~$15 telescope or probably binoculars too. I remember buying the galileoscope for $15 many years ago and was absolutely shocked how cool the moon looked, and how 3D.
Pro-tip: the full moon isn't so fun to look at, you want some level of crescent moon so you can avoid getting overloaded on the brightness.
(You can also stay up for a few hours and actually observe Io revolving around Jupiter, I think it takes most of the night to get 1/4 of the way around. Pretty obvious revolutions when you keep observing throughout the night.)
I planned to watch the live stream but wasn't able to. The moment of successful landing was quite modest, only a mostly-static screen with telemetrics was shown to the public, but it absolutely felt magical. It feels like the moon is well within humankind's reach by now.
Coincidentally, I found a copy of Uchu Kyodai (by Chuya Koyama) in my local library, and started reading it recently. It's fun to compare the perspectives from more than a decade ago, to the actual development we have right now, regarding space exploration.
(This was posted to another thread, but I moved it here after I realized comments were moved)
It's not any more or less out of reach for a medium-sized corporation than it's been since the 70s. The reason no corporation has gone is that there's no economic incentives to. And there's still not; this is a NASA mission, it's exploratory science funded by the public.
How do you expect to get to the Moon before SpaceX? The Space Shuttle ended up costing $2+ billion per launch, and given it's a government program - getting anything on it from an untested company who didn't already have major connections would be near to a nonstarter, and that's even if they could casually foot the billions of dollars it would have cost.
FireFly launched as a private company on a Falcon 9 so their cost was probably a peak of ~$0.07 billion (to maintain units) which may have been able to be privately negotiate downward given the nature of the mission.
The space shuttle isn't relevant to this conversation. Private industry has been putting things in space for decades, long before SpaceX existed. The reason no private company put a thing on the moon isn't because they couldn't, it was because nobody was paying them to, and because there is not otherwise any economic benefit to them for doing so. If your expected income is zero, it doesn't matter how low your costs are.
Smallest lunar lander so far is 200kg/440lbs, that's the weight of a carry on full of lead. Besides the Space Shuttle can't go higher or deliver higher than LEO anyway.
That's not an answer as we're looking for choices available from "the 70s" to before SpaceX so let's say around 2000. This issue is literally why SpaceX was started. Elon looked into NASA's plans for sending humans to Mars, saw they didn't exist and wanted to get the public more excited in space. His idea was to use his money to fund the launch of a greenhouse to Mars, which would be live streamed. No company in America was willing/able to do this, and in Russia the costs were far too high. So SpaceX was born.
You're right that Space Shuttle was a nonstarter for technical reasons, but it doesn't change the core issue. Neither does the mass. Unless you can find other companies willing to share a launch with you, you're paying for a whole rocket. And that's if you can manage to contract a rocket in the first place. As an inconsequential nitpick, no lander weighs 200kg. You're conflating landing mass (of which there's been well smaller than 200kg) with total launched mass. Fuel, thrusters, and so on multiply the weight substantially.
Yeah that's true, but I haven't really experienced the Apollo era personally. After the "gap" between the old space race, and the new race inspired by private space agencies, I do feel we are getting closer, to the moon at least.
Something most people don't appreciate is that, outside of the distance, Mars is super easy mode compared to the Moon. The Moon has 2 week long nights cycling between highs and lows in the range of -130C to +120C, inhospitable terrain, constantly getting pounded by meteorites, no atmosphere whatsoever, much higher radiation, much less gravity, and so on. Mars, by contrast, is oddly similar to Earth - similar day/night cycle, even a similar axial tilt meaning similar seasonal cycles, relatively reasonable temperature ranges, some atmosphere, and more.
This is why the image of the Moon as a stepping stone to Mars doesn't really make any sense. The Moon is very much 'hard mode', but it's closer. So the main tech issue to make up (long distance travel) is not one that progress on the Moon will go much towards advancing.
Well, Mars is so much farther away and much more massive so you need a lot of fuel if you want to come back. This is much more difficult than the extra fuel needed for the moon landing due to lack of atmosphere. Speaking of which, Mars having an atmosphere means you need complex heat shields for the landing.
Furthermore it's so far that unlike the case of the moon you can't make real time adjustments from earth, there's a delay of several minutes. Then again you have dust storms...
Atmospheres make landing easier and require less fuel! A big problem with landing is losing your speed which is going to be extremely high to begin with. On the Moon you can only do this by basically turning around in the opposite direction of your velocity and thrusting an equal but opposite amount. It's not only quite complex but also substantially complicates landing.
This is made even true on the Moon because its low gravity means that even a hair of velocity is going to make you 'bounce' after landing. This is why things like probes and rovers landing (or at least ending up) on their side or even upside down on the Moon is a fairly frequent affair. On Mars (and other places with an atmosphere) you can use atmospheric braking which is essentially just slowing down by bumping into the atmosphere in a controlled fashion. You can even get things like parachutes involved in the process.
The dust storms in Mars are also 'fake' at least as presented in movies/books like "The Martian." Mars has an extremely low atmospheric pressure (relative to Earth) so fiercest dust storm imaginable would feel like nothing more than a slight breeze. The only issue they pose is visibility, and dust accumulating on solar panels. Andy Weir, by the way, was well aware of this when writing "The Martian" which is otherwise a phenomenally well researched hard sci-fi book. I think it's highly telling that he had to intentionally fudge reality to create a crisis on Mars!
I think the big piece that is being overlooked here is the distance. The distance itself poses significant challenges. The obvious things like resupply and communication are much harder. But also the journey to mars is much harder on the human body.
Rescue and abort options are also much harder. The moon is close enough to easily resupply or rescue people on the surface, mars is much harder.
It would be very cool if we are able to properly colonize the moon in my lifetime. Even if we don't have humans living there like in Futurama (as cool as that would be), it would be unbelievably cool if we have constant back-and-forth trips to the moon.
As far as flights of fancy regarding the moon, I enjoyed Randall Munroe's "What if we put a pool on the moon" thought experiment. I would enjoy the experience of propelling myself out of the water like a dolphin!
There is no reason for humans to ever return to the moon. The cost and risks are not justified. Drones and robots can do anything that needs to be done. They don’t need to breathe, they don’t need to sleep, or eat.
I think it would be cool, and I don't know that I care if there's a "reason" to do it other than "human achievement".
I mean, there wasn't really a "reason" to go to the moon in the 60's either. I think I more or less agree with JFK on this:
"Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, 'Because it is there'. Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it"
I could try and find a lot of justifications about medical research or something, and those might be cool, but it would be dishonest if I pitched those as a "reason" to go, because I would want us to return even if those reasons weren't there.
If you haven’t heard it, Public Service Broadcasting used the JFK speech in their song “The Race for Space” from the album of the same name. If you’re even partially a space nerd, it’s worth a listen. Very inspirational and the final album track is relevant to todays news.
When Mallory climbed on Everest (and possibly summited) it was a big deal because it had never been done. When Hilary and Tenzing did it, it pushed human achievement forward.
Today people still do it, but it means nothing to anyone other than those people.
Going to the moon in the 60s was an impressive feat. It pushed the boundary forward. But that's all it did. There's literally nothing of value there.
Sure most of the people who saw that are dead, or will be in the next 20 years. So it will seem "cool" to the next generation. But selling "cool" to a congressional appropriations committee is a tough sell.
We aren't gonna colonize the moon (or indeed mars) because frankly it would be too expensive, and there's no point. There literally is nothing to gain from a colony in either place, and there's no way to fund it (and no reason to fund it.)
Tell that to the people of deadliest catch and dirty jobs: we have robots now that can do everything we want to without needing to sleep or eat! Sadly, we're not using them because they don't exist yet...
I'm too tall and I don't have twenty PhDs so I don't think "astronaut" is really on the table for me, but I would absolutely go to the moon if I had the opportunity.
The dust would give me some anxiety too but I think it would be worth it.
Robotics is unfortunately not there yet, unless we plan to send everything there fully assembled with zero maintenance ever. Unless you mean purely for basic exploration.
But if we are to go more interesting places... shouldn't we have down breathing, eating, and sleeping on the moon so well that it isn't much of a cost or a risk? It's inherently a good testing ground for things we need to do reliably much further later.
Imagine if we never built ISS because putting a space station in Earth's orbit was a solved problem...
For those who don’t live in Texas, many people who live in Cedar Park would say they are from Austin. It’s a suburb to the North. I know an engineer from Firefly from years ago. She was always fascinating to talk to. I also sold my MK3s+ 3D printer to a firefly employee via Craigslist a few years ago.
Offtopic, but what is up with YouTube's algorithm? Is it just me? When I scroll to see the next videos they are all very strange kids videos. Full of primary colors and super bizarre sequences. I was expecting to see more Firefly related videos.
One video is a kid flushing things down a toilet so an adult makes a cardboard toilet and picture cards they can put in. Next was a woman going into a theater and somebody put something in her backpack. Turns out it was a doll. Is anybody else seeing this stuff? What is it? Who's making it?
Super cool. This is one of those things you watch and just "feels like the future". I know, we've been there before but it still feels like an awesome event.
(someone go back to Venus, I know it's hard, but someone please)
As a former Intuitive Machines employee, I feel obligated to correct the title! IM-1 landed on the moon last February and although it didn't stay upright, it was still operational and returned some decent scientific data.
(This comment was posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43235933, where the title was "Firefly Aerospace becomes first commercial company to successfully land on moon". We merged that thread hither.)
So... the mission literally went sideways? Yet, our indomitable heroes saved the day!
Jokes apart, I think anybody getting anything off the ground and out of the planetary gravity well are heroes. It's kind of wild how... mundane... rocketry has become. Between that and always-on nearly-free global video calling from a smart watch, I feel like I'm living in the future of some of the 1950s SciFi books I read as a kid.
"Kings of Space" by Capt. W. E. Johns comes to mind. The smell of that old paperback copy I have transports me to another time.
Congrats to the FireFly team, this is an amazing achievement.
Video of the earth rising from the horizon reminded me of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech.
Any opensource libraries in that satellite's tech stack will now get to brag about "our code running on the moon" :) I wonder if FireFly team has used AI coding tools in any part of their development process.
This is great. And it’s sad to think this, but given current trends at the federal level and a competitor with influence, is there risk for the company and financing/operational options?
I really like "Our Blue Ghost lunar lander now has a permanent home on the lunar surface..."
It's rare that usage of word "permanent" has this close to an accurate meaning. Complete development of the moon's surface aside, what are the factors what will destroy it? Solar and cosmic radiation? What timescale are we talking about here?
The're a surprisingly high flux of micrometeoroid impacts at the lunar surface. Most of these are too small to do much damage, but there will probably be measurable erosion in centuries and genuine damage within about 1 million years. The timeline for it to be destroyed/completely broken down is much longer.
For context, there's roughly a 50% chance of an astronaut being hit by a micrometeoroid large enough to kill them every 1.3 million years of time spent on the moon's surface. There's roughly a 50% chance of a square meter of the moon being hit by a micrometeoroid equavalent to 3 kg on TNT in a billion years.
Thank you for seeing through my sloppy writing, and identifying what I was getting at. I should have have said "aside from human intervention."
So, aside from the human intervention, and assuming that the materials can generally withstand radiation... let's say it's 6 sq meters, [0] I know this is not exactly how it works, but if LLMs[1] and my own lacking skills at mathematics are accurate, then ~70 million years? That sounds so much more "permanent" than anything on Earth.
Water in concert with temperature flux is really destructive causing a massive amount of erosion here on Earth.
With that said thermal cycles on the moon are very large, with a range up to 450F. That much thermal expansion and contraction over time is going to be hard on anything not shielded under some soil.
Overwhelmingly likely to be human interference, even without "complete development of the moon's surface".
Perhaps somebody thinks it would make a good museum piece back on Earth, or some bored spacefaring teen vandals destroy it for the lulz, or religious norms will change and those in power will blow it up to show their rejection of idols of a now forbidden age.
One person's rubbish is another's priceless artefact.
Landed craft on the moon often carry reflectors that help laser location of the Moon.
Spacecraft that have spent decades the Moon's surface are also going to give valuable clues about the behavior of their materials in these conditions, if / when someone collects and inspects them. Could save quite a bit of uncertainty for a larger project on the Moon.
Also, isn't basically everything you see on the moon some kind of debris? There are no apparent structures there created by complex, interesting processes, such as life, or by interesting geological processes. The spacecraft would be an aesthetical center of the area :)
Yes, but be patient, we're 1.24 light-seconds away (so lower bandwidth) and we have a lot of science to get done in the next 14 days, and that's the main objective of the NASA CLPS program.
There have been plenty of pictures of older landing sites.
Most of those people have a part of their identity tied up in contrarian ideas, and would find a way to call it fake, even if you personally flew them up to the landing sites to have a look.
Rogan hasn't believed that for nearly a decade because he learned more about the physics of the Moon and the engineering of the time. Since you have an interest in truth and honesty, I'm sure now that you've been informed you won't spread this misinformation anymore and will do some reflection on how you ended up holding this view for so long past when it no longer was true.
Even when the moon is finally settled on, I guarantee you that nobody will make any effort to clean it up and throw it away.
It is truely sad that we can be sure that even thousands of years in the future, despite millions of humans looking at it every day, people will rather put a glass box around it, so nobody is bothered by it, than just tossing it into the lunar landfill.
Here are the pictures it has taken so far:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/albums/7217772031...
There's also a cool lunar flyover video taken during final deorbit.
It's fascinating how the pictures have that "Apollo moon landing" look. I'd always assumed that a huge part of this was just 1960s technology (film not digital etc), but apparently it's actually coming from the literally unearthly lighting conditions of being on the Moon.
that's a great point about the lighting... it really does contribute to that distinctive look. i've also read that the lack of atmosphere on the moon sharpens the shadows and increases the contrast, which probably adds to that effect.
> 1960s technology
Still photography has gotten more convenient since then, but in the agreeable lighting and atmospheric conditions one would encounter while taking a vacation snap outside at noon Cynthian time, image quality now isn't better than then*
*Unless you're willing to spend $10,000+
> *Unless you're willing to spend $10,000+
OP is comparing photography tech that made it to the Moon, so not cheap tech. The "special" way the photos look like is probably more a product of the environment than just the equipment.
Different films have varied responses/curves to contrast than digital sensors. This is likely what GP is referring to.
Yeah it's the lack of atmospheric scattering.
Yeah due to the lack of a blue sky, shadows on the moon are basically completely black and challenging to photograph.
Also the Hasselblad camera they sent to the moon back then was actually pretty good even by modern standards.
I am no expert, but to my knowledge the space flight tech evolves very slowly, if at all. One reason for that is that modern tech is supposedly too sensitive to radiation. So you want to balance what's worthwhile to upgrade, and fancy videos are probably low on that list.
Space engineer here, not exactly true, esp for non-critical systems. Check out the "Careful COTS" paper by Doug Sinclair
The paper is 12 years old. If there haven't been other methods to evaluate modern commercial tech, then it's an actual proof of tech evolving slowly due to radiation concerns. Even the process pointed out in the paper requires resources, but it just got a bit faster in the last years.
Apart from that, adding new components is also costly. You just don't order a random megapixel camera from alibaba and slam it on your 1bn space project.
Considering I made clear that i am no expert and my claims were under that context your response was simply arrogant and not helpful.
The Apollo astronauts used Hasselblads for still photography. I'm pretty sure Firefly is not sending back rolls of 6x6 film.
What is the point? Are we comparing coconuts and apples?
Well, you were the one telling me "space tech evolves slowly", when Apollo was taking their pictures with a film coconut, Firefly is using a digital apple, and yet the output still looks eerily similar.
you are talking about stills. still don't know what the actual tech difference is.
Well it's either that or the tin foil hat people will say they just rented the OG soundstage.
Nvidia did a great presentation about the lighting for the original. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syVP6zDZN7I
Once SpaceX gets Starship launching weekly, it'll probably be cheaper to send a bot with a camera to the moon than to rent a sound stage and build a big set!
These pictures are great - maybe it's time for me to get a new desktop background.
Kinda related: some years ago NASA published all the Apollo missions pictures. I downloaded all of them (hundreds, maybe bit more), acting as a photo editor then I selected "good ones", cropped them to 16:10 format and made a background picture pack - I'm using it on all my devices since then. If someone is interested, they're published at [0] - feel free to use.
[0]: https://share.icloud.com/photos/0577bWqlyiqqaz9zeI0cEcE7Q
Thank you for sharing this!
Here [0] is the original archive, 15k pictures.
[0]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/with/5133...
Flickr? Moon landing? What year is it?
Flickr has had a resurgence of popularity among photographers since yahoo sold it. It’s easily the best “professional” photo hosting site currently.
This is an interesting tangent. Is it Flickr's copyright rules that make it attractive? Or, something else? Lack of existing competitors? Not associated with a social media account?
If you’re going to post albums of high-res photographs on the internet… why not Flickr?
yea, flickr has always been reliable for this sort of thing
Pity that the videos were accompanied by such cheesy music. A soundtrack derived from telemetry would have been killer. Example project here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbLdd1fdNg5ymNYshv2xW...
Return to the basics like Pierre Henry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZPDrNAFo1U
The videos are amazing
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/54353240540/in/al...
They are indeed, but the soundtrack could be better.
How are the videos captured or processed? The solar lens flares are smoothly interpolated but the moon surface shows lower FPS, almost feels like the flares were on a separate layer.
My guess: they are the same update rate. The lens flares have blurrier edges and move less across the screen. This makes the jumps less obvious.
CGI animations also add blurring, and even your eyes have an integration time that will make fast moving objects blurry. So your brain good at interpolating blurry edges.
Absolute cinema, Firefly showing how it's done.
this is awesome, look at all those craters!
Can't wait to see the VFX breakdown /s
Yeah, CUDAs to the Team!
Horray!
Also:
- Wow but the moon is 3D. Like, when we see shots of Earth, the ground always looks so flat, but the depth of the craters and the heights of the ridges is really, really amazing to see
- ...KSP did a really good job mimicking the real thing
I noticed this too. Something about the perspective is unnerving, like an amusement park ride. You can see clearly that the moon is small, the craters are big, and the orbiting spacecraft is moving really really fast, all at the same time. None of that is apparent from video of low Earth orbit. And then the stark lighting makes it feel even more bizarre and alien.
The most 3-D experience that I have had with the moon, on the cheap, is when its not in it's full phase. With a cheap telescope, when you observe the edge of the partial-phase moon's crescent, you see the "terminator." It suddenly feels so different, finally you see the moon's bumpy spherical nature. It's like you are flying just above it.
> The terminator is where you'll see the most pronounced shadows cast by the lunar features like craters, mountains, and valleys. This is because the Sun is at a low angle relative to the lunar surface, emphasizing the topography and allowing you to see craters and other features in sharp relief
> - ...KSP did a really good job mimicking the real thing
The pic with the shadow of the lander is really close to what you get out of KSP when you first land on Mun or Minmus. Really really cool. Congrats to everyone who made this happen!
Interesting how Luna has more of a Minmus feel in terms of scale, the horizon is so close. Something to do with the wide angle lens I imagine?
One of the coolest things ever is you can see the shadows and depths of the craters on the moon from here on Earth, with a cheap ~$15 telescope or probably binoculars too. I remember buying the galileoscope for $15 many years ago and was absolutely shocked how cool the moon looked, and how 3D.
Pro-tip: the full moon isn't so fun to look at, you want some level of crescent moon so you can avoid getting overloaded on the brightness.
(You can also stay up for a few hours and actually observe Io revolving around Jupiter, I think it takes most of the night to get 1/4 of the way around. Pretty obvious revolutions when you keep observing throughout the night.)
insert flat-moon comment here
Why are the interiors of the craters uniformly deep?
[dead]
Congrats to everyone involved!
I planned to watch the live stream but wasn't able to. The moment of successful landing was quite modest, only a mostly-static screen with telemetrics was shown to the public, but it absolutely felt magical. It feels like the moon is well within humankind's reach by now.
Coincidentally, I found a copy of Uchu Kyodai (by Chuya Koyama) in my local library, and started reading it recently. It's fun to compare the perspectives from more than a decade ago, to the actual development we have right now, regarding space exploration.
(This was posted to another thread, but I moved it here after I realized comments were moved)
> It feels like the moon is well within humankind's reach by now.
It has been for the last 65 years. ;)
It's now within reach for a medium sized corporation, largely ignored by humankind.
That's huge progress!
It's not any more or less out of reach for a medium-sized corporation than it's been since the 70s. The reason no corporation has gone is that there's no economic incentives to. And there's still not; this is a NASA mission, it's exploratory science funded by the public.
Since the 70s, costs have gone down by a factor 10-20x, and the technology is much better and safer.
If that made it "out of reach" back then depends on what you mean with those words, but it's undeniably far cheaper and safer now.
How do you expect to get to the Moon before SpaceX? The Space Shuttle ended up costing $2+ billion per launch, and given it's a government program - getting anything on it from an untested company who didn't already have major connections would be near to a nonstarter, and that's even if they could casually foot the billions of dollars it would have cost.
FireFly launched as a private company on a Falcon 9 so their cost was probably a peak of ~$0.07 billion (to maintain units) which may have been able to be privately negotiate downward given the nature of the mission.
The space shuttle isn't relevant to this conversation. Private industry has been putting things in space for decades, long before SpaceX existed. The reason no private company put a thing on the moon isn't because they couldn't, it was because nobody was paying them to, and because there is not otherwise any economic benefit to them for doing so. If your expected income is zero, it doesn't matter how low your costs are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orbital_launch_systems
Smallest lunar lander so far is 200kg/440lbs, that's the weight of a carry on full of lead. Besides the Space Shuttle can't go higher or deliver higher than LEO anyway.
That's not an answer as we're looking for choices available from "the 70s" to before SpaceX so let's say around 2000. This issue is literally why SpaceX was started. Elon looked into NASA's plans for sending humans to Mars, saw they didn't exist and wanted to get the public more excited in space. His idea was to use his money to fund the launch of a greenhouse to Mars, which would be live streamed. No company in America was willing/able to do this, and in Russia the costs were far too high. So SpaceX was born.
You're right that Space Shuttle was a nonstarter for technical reasons, but it doesn't change the core issue. Neither does the mass. Unless you can find other companies willing to share a launch with you, you're paying for a whole rocket. And that's if you can manage to contract a rocket in the first place. As an inconsequential nitpick, no lander weighs 200kg. You're conflating landing mass (of which there's been well smaller than 200kg) with total launched mass. Fuel, thrusters, and so on multiply the weight substantially.
Yeah that's true, but I haven't really experienced the Apollo era personally. After the "gap" between the old space race, and the new race inspired by private space agencies, I do feel we are getting closer, to the moon at least.
Something most people don't appreciate is that, outside of the distance, Mars is super easy mode compared to the Moon. The Moon has 2 week long nights cycling between highs and lows in the range of -130C to +120C, inhospitable terrain, constantly getting pounded by meteorites, no atmosphere whatsoever, much higher radiation, much less gravity, and so on. Mars, by contrast, is oddly similar to Earth - similar day/night cycle, even a similar axial tilt meaning similar seasonal cycles, relatively reasonable temperature ranges, some atmosphere, and more.
This is why the image of the Moon as a stepping stone to Mars doesn't really make any sense. The Moon is very much 'hard mode', but it's closer. So the main tech issue to make up (long distance travel) is not one that progress on the Moon will go much towards advancing.
Well, Mars is so much farther away and much more massive so you need a lot of fuel if you want to come back. This is much more difficult than the extra fuel needed for the moon landing due to lack of atmosphere. Speaking of which, Mars having an atmosphere means you need complex heat shields for the landing. Furthermore it's so far that unlike the case of the moon you can't make real time adjustments from earth, there's a delay of several minutes. Then again you have dust storms...
Atmospheres make landing easier and require less fuel! A big problem with landing is losing your speed which is going to be extremely high to begin with. On the Moon you can only do this by basically turning around in the opposite direction of your velocity and thrusting an equal but opposite amount. It's not only quite complex but also substantially complicates landing.
This is made even true on the Moon because its low gravity means that even a hair of velocity is going to make you 'bounce' after landing. This is why things like probes and rovers landing (or at least ending up) on their side or even upside down on the Moon is a fairly frequent affair. On Mars (and other places with an atmosphere) you can use atmospheric braking which is essentially just slowing down by bumping into the atmosphere in a controlled fashion. You can even get things like parachutes involved in the process.
The dust storms in Mars are also 'fake' at least as presented in movies/books like "The Martian." Mars has an extremely low atmospheric pressure (relative to Earth) so fiercest dust storm imaginable would feel like nothing more than a slight breeze. The only issue they pose is visibility, and dust accumulating on solar panels. Andy Weir, by the way, was well aware of this when writing "The Martian" which is otherwise a phenomenally well researched hard sci-fi book. I think it's highly telling that he had to intentionally fudge reality to create a crisis on Mars!
I think the big piece that is being overlooked here is the distance. The distance itself poses significant challenges. The obvious things like resupply and communication are much harder. But also the journey to mars is much harder on the human body.
Rescue and abort options are also much harder. The moon is close enough to easily resupply or rescue people on the surface, mars is much harder.
Hell yeah!
It would be very cool if we are able to properly colonize the moon in my lifetime. Even if we don't have humans living there like in Futurama (as cool as that would be), it would be unbelievably cool if we have constant back-and-forth trips to the moon.
Or we could just blow it up, which might be fun in its own right: https://youtu.be/GTJ3LIA5LmA
As far as flights of fancy regarding the moon, I enjoyed Randall Munroe's "What if we put a pool on the moon" thought experiment. I would enjoy the experience of propelling myself out of the water like a dolphin!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIIBBj6KR-Y
Fun fact, both the US and the Soviet Union had plans to nuke the moon in the 50s. US Project A119 and Soviet Project E-4.
There is no reason for humans to ever return to the moon. The cost and risks are not justified. Drones and robots can do anything that needs to be done. They don’t need to breathe, they don’t need to sleep, or eat.
I think it would be cool, and I don't know that I care if there's a "reason" to do it other than "human achievement".
I mean, there wasn't really a "reason" to go to the moon in the 60's either. I think I more or less agree with JFK on this:
"Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, 'Because it is there'. Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it"
I could try and find a lot of justifications about medical research or something, and those might be cool, but it would be dishonest if I pitched those as a "reason" to go, because I would want us to return even if those reasons weren't there.
If you haven’t heard it, Public Service Broadcasting used the JFK speech in their song “The Race for Space” from the album of the same name. If you’re even partially a space nerd, it’s worth a listen. Very inspirational and the final album track is relevant to todays news.
https://youtu.be/4HZAc7EKFJQ
When Mallory climbed on Everest (and possibly summited) it was a big deal because it had never been done. When Hilary and Tenzing did it, it pushed human achievement forward.
Today people still do it, but it means nothing to anyone other than those people.
Going to the moon in the 60s was an impressive feat. It pushed the boundary forward. But that's all it did. There's literally nothing of value there.
Sure most of the people who saw that are dead, or will be in the next 20 years. So it will seem "cool" to the next generation. But selling "cool" to a congressional appropriations committee is a tough sell.
We aren't gonna colonize the moon (or indeed mars) because frankly it would be too expensive, and there's no point. There literally is nothing to gain from a colony in either place, and there's no way to fund it (and no reason to fund it.)
> There's literally nothing of value there.
ISRU water to hydrolox to reduce amount of uplift from earth's gravity well?
Tell that to the people of deadliest catch and dirty jobs: we have robots now that can do everything we want to without needing to sleep or eat! Sadly, we're not using them because they don't exist yet...
They probably could exist, they’d simply be more expensive than putting a human on a boat.
The relative costs are flipped for putting a human on Mars/moon - the robot is cheaper.
Not that anyone’s offering me the choice of course but I’m happy to leave it to the robots. Lunar dust gives me the creeps.
Imagine stepping outside into a world where absolutely everything is coated in dark gray copy toner that gets ingrained into all that touches it.
I don’t think I could do it due to the anxiety.
I'm too tall and I don't have twenty PhDs so I don't think "astronaut" is really on the table for me, but I would absolutely go to the moon if I had the opportunity.
The dust would give me some anxiety too but I think it would be worth it.
Robotics is unfortunately not there yet, unless we plan to send everything there fully assembled with zero maintenance ever. Unless you mean purely for basic exploration.
But if we are to go more interesting places... shouldn't we have down breathing, eating, and sleeping on the moon so well that it isn't much of a cost or a risk? It's inherently a good testing ground for things we need to do reliably much further later.
Imagine if we never built ISS because putting a space station in Earth's orbit was a solved problem...
I'd like to see us colonize Antártica with a self sufficient colony first. Seems like a much cheaper testbed.
"I've been saying we should do this for years. I walked on the moon. Did a pushup, ate an egg on it. What else can you do with it?"
Mr Show has held up well, maybe even gotten better with time.
More info:
- https://x.com/Firefly_Space/status/1896127381670367703
- https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/touchdown-carrying-nasa-sc...
There's that pale blue dot! Nice selfie.
https://x.com/Firefly_Space/status/1896158394295390367/photo...
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43224107
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 Lunar Landing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43224107 - March 2025 (40 comments)
Blue Ghost Moon landing Sunday 3:30am EST using Earth GPS lock 238000 miles away - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43222015 - March 2025 (3 comments)
Nyx Space and Rust Power Firefly's Blue Ghost Lunar Landing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43217811 - March 2025 (1 comment)
> Cedar Park, Texas
For those who don’t live in Texas, many people who live in Cedar Park would say they are from Austin. It’s a suburb to the North. I know an engineer from Firefly from years ago. She was always fascinating to talk to. I also sold my MK3s+ 3D printer to a firefly employee via Craigslist a few years ago.
I’m glad they’re having some success.
And they do all their manufacturing in Briggs, TX about 30 minutes north of their HQ.
What a strange name.
Here's some behind-the-scenes from the vision navigation team:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/s9E8DBK896w
Offtopic, but what is up with YouTube's algorithm? Is it just me? When I scroll to see the next videos they are all very strange kids videos. Full of primary colors and super bizarre sequences. I was expecting to see more Firefly related videos.
One video is a kid flushing things down a toilet so an adult makes a cardboard toilet and picture cards they can put in. Next was a woman going into a theater and somebody put something in her backpack. Turns out it was a doll. Is anybody else seeing this stuff? What is it? Who's making it?
Super cool! Good working with you guys ;-)
Super cool. This is one of those things you watch and just "feels like the future". I know, we've been there before but it still feels like an awesome event.
(someone go back to Venus, I know it's hard, but someone please)
This is excellent news. Private sector companies are going into space, landing on extraterrestrial bodies. Hope this spur more activities outward.
> Firefly is carrying out this mission as a contractor under NASA’s CLPS and Artemis programs
As a former Intuitive Machines employee, I feel obligated to correct the title! IM-1 landed on the moon last February and although it didn't stay upright, it was still operational and returned some decent scientific data.
Congratulations to both teams :)
Getting to the moon at all is a huge accomplishment.
The article actually mentioned IM-1 (though not by name) and got me looking.
(This comment was posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43235933, where the title was "Firefly Aerospace becomes first commercial company to successfully land on moon". We merged that thread hither.)
Former and current employees, congratulations to you all!
How cool is it to have your work preserved for thousands to millions of years, on the surface of the moon?!
I cannot imagine much anything more fun.
It was flipped upside-down like a Turtle?
That was a separate lander, from Japan!
Well how else do you expect to be able to keep the Moon up?
Sideways. Still functional, but in somewhat limited capacity.
So... the mission literally went sideways? Yet, our indomitable heroes saved the day!
Jokes apart, I think anybody getting anything off the ground and out of the planetary gravity well are heroes. It's kind of wild how... mundane... rocketry has become. Between that and always-on nearly-free global video calling from a smart watch, I feel like I'm living in the future of some of the 1950s SciFi books I read as a kid.
"Kings of Space" by Capt. W. E. Johns comes to mind. The smell of that old paperback copy I have transports me to another time.
awe inspiring photos .. and we really need awe-inspiring right now.
Congrats to the FireFly team, this is an amazing achievement.
Video of the earth rising from the horizon reminded me of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech.
Any opensource libraries in that satellite's tech stack will now get to brag about "our code running on the moon" :) I wonder if FireFly team has used AI coding tools in any part of their development process.
> Any opensource libraries in that satellite's tech stack will now get to brag about "our code running on the moon" :)
A safe bet would be that SQLite is on there. It's already in airplanes / satellites.
Docker is
This is great. And it’s sad to think this, but given current trends at the federal level and a competitor with influence, is there risk for the company and financing/operational options?
My manager: What's the hoopla about? It was done more than 50 years ago. Tech people make a lot of noise about things that have been done already.
“Firefly is literally and figuratively over the Moon,”
I really like "Our Blue Ghost lunar lander now has a permanent home on the lunar surface..."
It's rare that usage of word "permanent" has this close to an accurate meaning. Complete development of the moon's surface aside, what are the factors what will destroy it? Solar and cosmic radiation? What timescale are we talking about here?
The're a surprisingly high flux of micrometeoroid impacts at the lunar surface. Most of these are too small to do much damage, but there will probably be measurable erosion in centuries and genuine damage within about 1 million years. The timeline for it to be destroyed/completely broken down is much longer.
For context, there's roughly a 50% chance of an astronaut being hit by a micrometeoroid large enough to kill them every 1.3 million years of time spent on the moon's surface. There's roughly a 50% chance of a square meter of the moon being hit by a micrometeoroid equavalent to 3 kg on TNT in a billion years.
Thank you for seeing through my sloppy writing, and identifying what I was getting at. I should have have said "aside from human intervention."
So, aside from the human intervention, and assuming that the materials can generally withstand radiation... let's say it's 6 sq meters, [0] I know this is not exactly how it works, but if LLMs[1] and my own lacking skills at mathematics are accurate, then ~70 million years? That sounds so much more "permanent" than anything on Earth.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitive_Machines_Nova-C
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/67c51a06-51e8-8012-9f21-c9a428551d... (it would be amazing if someone could verify this math and logic, I cannot)
Water in concert with temperature flux is really destructive causing a massive amount of erosion here on Earth.
With that said thermal cycles on the moon are very large, with a range up to 450F. That much thermal expansion and contraction over time is going to be hard on anything not shielded under some soil.
I wonder what a structure of metal(aluminum?) would look like after hundreds of thousands of 14-day 450F cycles.
How many cycles would it take to turn into a mound? Would a coherent mound still count as "existing?"
Overwhelmingly likely to be human interference, even without "complete development of the moon's surface".
Perhaps somebody thinks it would make a good museum piece back on Earth, or some bored spacefaring teen vandals destroy it for the lulz, or religious norms will change and those in power will blow it up to show their rejection of idols of a now forbidden age.
I'd give it hundreds of years, but not thousands.
One person's rubbish is another's priceless artefact.
Landed craft on the moon often carry reflectors that help laser location of the Moon.
Spacecraft that have spent decades the Moon's surface are also going to give valuable clues about the behavior of their materials in these conditions, if / when someone collects and inspects them. Could save quite a bit of uncertainty for a larger project on the Moon.
Also, isn't basically everything you see on the moon some kind of debris? There are no apparent structures there created by complex, interesting processes, such as life, or by interesting geological processes. The spacecraft would be an aesthetical center of the area :)
Truly incredible!
https://flic.kr/p/2qP1yLU
https://flic.kr/p/2qJKm4o
Do we get 4k video? :)
Yes, but be patient, we're 1.24 light-seconds away (so lower bandwidth) and we have a lot of science to get done in the next 14 days, and that's the main objective of the NASA CLPS program.
Nice. Now to kill the manned lunar program and send more robotic missions.
"Firefly is the prime contractor for lunar delivery services using Blue Ghost landers."
Cool! Now we can start cluttering up the moon with garbage, too!
Anyone know if they flew over the site of the Apollo 11 lunar module landing?
Surely they'd do it just for the publicity and ability to shut up Joe Rogan and the other nutjobs that consider that landing fake.
Would it? Surely they'd just claim that this new company is themselves "in on the hoax".
There have been plenty of pictures of older landing sites. Most of those people have a part of their identity tied up in contrarian ideas, and would find a way to call it fake, even if you personally flew them up to the landing sites to have a look.
No, we didn't fly over any of the Apollo sites for BGM1. We flew pretty close to the terminator line.
Theres no level of evidence they will accept. They have thought terminating cliches for everything.
Rogan hasn't believed that for nearly a decade because he learned more about the physics of the Moon and the engineering of the time. Since you have an interest in truth and honesty, I'm sure now that you've been informed you won't spread this misinformation anymore and will do some reflection on how you ended up holding this view for so long past when it no longer was true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mmlmxamw_k
They did, they flew over the same set at Area 51 (/s???)
I bet the code for the ship and the lander wasn't written by AI.
"At the end of its operations, Blue Ghost will stay put, destined to remain on the moon’s surface indefinitely."
Is that a euphemism for "Humans are leaving rubbish to pollute another part of the universe?"
> Is that a euphemism for "Humans are leaving rubbish to pollute another part of the universe?"
Yes, in the same sense that the Pyramids and Stonehenge and the Parthenon are rubbish
Well, I guess some alien archeologists will have some fun trying to figure out what it was used for.
Way worse.
Even when the moon is finally settled on, I guarantee you that nobody will make any effort to clean it up and throw it away.
It is truely sad that we can be sure that even thousands of years in the future, despite millions of humans looking at it every day, people will rather put a glass box around it, so nobody is bothered by it, than just tossing it into the lunar landfill.
Well, the universe is fairly big and humankind even if you add it all up is quite small. So....I don't think it will be a great problem for a while.
Leaving spare parts for the lunar colony seems a fine idea.
Oh no, were going to damage the biosphere of the moon!