Some Parts of America Still Work

Hint: They're not in the government or academic worlds.

Some parts of America still work.

You could be forgiven for forgetting that, given how many parts don’t.  The government’s Covid response was a debacle, our President is cognitively-challenged, Congress seems incapable of doing anything except spending money, and most of the corporate world seems clueless.  (Google’s Gemini AI even responded to requests to produce images of Vikings, Nazi soldiers, and antebellum plantation owners by producing images of black people in the appropriate costume, apparently the result of too much “diversity” programming.)  It takes forever to build a road or a bridge, Boeing aircraft are falling apart left and right, and websites seem glitchier and harder to use than they were ten years ago.

But some parts of America work amazingly well.  We saw one of them last week, when Intuitive Machines, a private company, landed the first American spacecraft on the Moon in over 50 years.  

That it got there is amazing enough, but how it got there is an embodiment of the sort of “right stuff” that we associate with an earlier, more competent America.

The Russian Luna-23 lander failed and crashed into the Moon last summer.  Indian and Israeli landing attempts also failed.  And  Astrobotics, a Houston company, launched its Peregrine lander that wound up crashing into Earth after rounding the moon, unable to land due to a ruptured propellant tank.

Well, space is hard.

But Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander overcame obstacles to land safely, if a bit roughly, on the Moon and now it’s doing its job.

On the way, a laser rangefinder used to calculate height during landing failed.  Without that, the spacecraft wouldn’t have been able to calibrate its landing.  But the lander also carried an experimental NASA package testing Lidar (a sort of light-based radar) that the engineers were able to turn into a replacement for the rangefinder.

The NASA package wasn’t meant to be used to control a spacecraft; it was just there to gather data.  But the Intuitive Machines engineers were able to produce a software update on the fly and upload it to the spacecraft, allowing the NASA Lidar package to control Odysseus’s descent.

The result was a soft landing, though not a perfect one.  The lander was going a bit fast, and drifting to the side when it landed, causing it to tip over.  (Weirdly, something similar happened with the Japanese SLIM lander.)  But the solar cells are still generating a charge, and all the experiment packages are working.  It’s even sending back pictures, like this one:

One of 11 other packages on the spacecraft, a camera called EagleCam built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, was supposed to be ejected just before landing and take pictures of Odysseus as it touched down.  The engineers didn’t want to complicate an already fraught landing, so they kept it onboard.  As I write this, they’re working on deploying the EagleCam from the surface to get pictures of Odysseus and see exactly what’s going on.  All the other systems on the spacecraft are continuing to work and send data.

So a small private company that almost no one had heard of has done something that several nation states have recently failed at, and that the United States government hasn’t done since before most people alive today were born.  Not bad.

Of course, Intuitive Machines isn’t the only American company distinguishing itself in space.  The 500 pound gorilla of the space business is Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has consistently launched increasing numbers of increasingly capable spacecraft with unprecedented reliability, while drastically cutting the cost per pound of putting things in orbit to a small fraction of what it cost on the Space Shuttle or previous expendable rockets.

SpaceX’s accomplishments have become so commonplace that they’re barely news, but that in itself is news.  Other American companies, like Rocket Lab, are doing much the same thing on a smaller scale.  The payoffs aren’t just the showy parts.  Behind the rockets climbing into the sky are all sorts of accomplishments in materials science, manufacturing, process design, and more.  We don’t get a look under the hood at SpaceX very often, but what’s there obviously works.

I’m happy about this in part because I agree with Elon Musk that our civilization will stagnate, or implode, unless we get human settlement spread around the solar system.  As Robert Heinlein said, the Earth is too fragile a basket to hold all of humanity’s eggs.

But even if you don’t agree with that, you should be happy to see an important – and fast-growing – segment of the economy demonstrating that there is, in fact, still an America that works, and that can do great things.  Can we have more of this, please?