• Landing in the moon’s polar region is much harder than landing in the equatorial region. This is the first successful landing on the moon’s South Pole.

      Luna-25 was also aiming for the poles; the Russians already know how to do a normal lunsr landing.

    • d-RLY?
      link
      fedilink
      71 year ago

      While I understand your headspace. Space isn’t easy even with modern tech for any nation (or company in the case of the private launch sector). They didn’t have the benefit of the Space Race injecting mad money and manpower like the US and the USSR did (shit is hard to justify spending money on while still being on the newer side of certain industrial development as a nation). They also had to make their own systems to get there. Even SpaceX still has failures to land their first stage boosters after getting it pretty well figured out. Just a crazy amount of variables means it will fail majorly if any random one is wrong. Even if they had failed to land, it would still be worth some respect for even getting on target. I think that once AI is much more mature (and not just a large language model that tends to just make shit up that sounds correct but isn’t), then I think your stance would be more correct. As the ship itself would be able to deal with all of it with or without input from earth. Would also be better at making the tough calls to abort or proceed without any emotions/stress causing bad decisions.

      • What di you mean. There was no real time control. Landing instructions were provided well ahead of time and onboard systems too control through out from 30kms to touch down including the precise spot which was done from 800meters off.

        I dont know how many would classify that as AI but it was an autonomous system landing.