A Second Failed Moon

Landing
India lost contact with its spacecraft just before touchdown.
Why is it so hard to stick a lunar landing?
MARINA KOREN
8:33 AM ET
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Half a century is a blip on cosmic timescales, but feels like an age in

technological innovation, long enough to transform a task once
considered impossible into something quite doable. So it might
seem that, 50 years after human beings touched the surface of the
moon, landing a spacecraft on our next-door neighbor should be
less difficult, perhaps even easy.

It’s not.
The latest attempt to land on the moon failed this week, after an
Indian spacecraft, an uncrewed, robotic mission, appeared to have
crashed. The Chandrayaan-2 mission, developed and launched by
India’s space agency, began orbiting the moon in August and
released a lander yesterday. Mission control lost contact with the
lander, named Vikram, as it neared the surface. Indian officials have
not yet announced the cause of the failure.

The people working on lunar missions today, from engineers at

government agencies to billionaire businessmen who own multiple
companies, are certainly not starting from zero, as the United States
and the former Soviet Union did.

“In some ways it’s much easier,” says Yoav Landsman, a spacecraft
engineer. “But in the end, it’s not easy at all.”

Read: The moment that made Neil Armstrong’s heart rate spike
Landsman would know. In April, his own lunar mission smashed
into pieces on the surface. Like Vikram, the Beresheet lander, built
by the Israeli nonprofit group SpaceIL, stopped calling home just
before it was supposed to touch down. The only successful attempt
this year was made in January, when China landed a spacecraft,
with rover included, on the far side of the moon, the face that never
turns toward Earth—a world first.

Chandrayaan, Sanskrit for “moon craft,” launched in July, poised to

make India only the fourth country to land something on the moon,
after the United States, China, and the former Soviet Union. A
decade earlier, the Chandrayaan-1 mission delivered an orbiter
carrying a probe that was deliberately crashed into the surface as a
test run. This time, the orbiter would deploy a lander and rover for a
gentle landing. They were bound for the side of the moon that we
can see, to a spot near its south pole, a place other spacefaring
nations, including the U.S., are eyeing for its potentially numerous
reservoirs of frozen water—an indispensable resource for a future
moon base.

It is certainly easier now to land on the moon than in the 1960s, for
many reasons, some rather obvious, like the strain of technological
achievement, in software and hardware,
that created supercomputers small enough to fit into pockets.
During the Space Race, engineers had to figure out how orbital
mechanics worked from scratch. And if an agency wanted
something for its spacecraft, it probably had to invent the thing
first.

Now, many accoutrements of a space mission come off the shelf,

and buying them is made easier by something else that didn’t exist
during the Apollo era: the internet. Landsman says mission teams
can shop online for sensors, computers, solar panels, and
propulsion systems. Even the rockets are ready-made. “You can go
out and buy a launch,” says John Thornton, the CEO of Astrobotic,
an American company that is developing a lunar lander called
Peregrine. Astrobotic is paying the United Launch Alliance, a rocket
manufacturer, to launch Peregrine in 2021. Beresheet, the Israeli
lander, launched on a SpaceX rocket.

Read: An abrupt end to a historic moon mission

Today we know more about what the moon looks like up close,
thanks to orbiting spacecraft with high-resolution cameras that
provide mission planners with detailed photos they need to
carefully select landing sites. A small NASA mission, sent to lunar
orbit in 2011, provided data about the gravitational forces around
the moon that, Landsman says, every engineer uses now.

But some mysteries persist (such as the provision of funding and

political will—another story). The lunar regolith, as fine as powder,
is still poorly understood, says Alicia Dwyer Cianciolo, an aerospace
engineer at NASA who is working on the agency’s new plans to send
robotic missions to the moon. “I don’t know if we got lucky on the
other missions, but we feel like some of the new engine types and
the thrust levels that we will have—we really don’t understand how
it will stir up the different kinds of regolith in different locations on
the moon,” Cianciolo says. Landers could kick up a cloud of dust
that blocks sensors from detecting the craters or boulders that a
last-minute engine burn might avoid. And the thrust could displace
enough lunar matter that the spacecraft lands tilted, a position that
could prevent a rover from rolling out safely.
The mysteries of the lunar environment make it difficult to predict,
let alone perfect, the complicated maneuvers of a landing sequence.
Simulations on Earth provide incomplete pictures of a
preprogrammed process that unfolds autonomously millions of
miles away. The spacecraft must go from a speed of thousands of
miles per hour to nearly zero in about 15 minutes. It has to ignite its
engines and thrust itself against the direction it is hurtling toward.
As it slows, it falls, and more engine burns are needed to keep it
from plummeting too fast.

“It’s actually like landing a missile,” Landsman says.

The spacecraft is covered in sensors that track its altitude and scan
the surroundings for any perilous obstacles below. The inputs can
help the spacecraft make a snap decision right above the surface,
but the moon’s gravity, faint but influential, will eventually take
over. If India’s attempt had worked, the Vikram lander would have
coasted to a gentle stop.

Read: What is the Apollo 11 site like today?

As Vikram began its descent yesterday, the atmosphere at the

headquarters of the Indian Space Research Organization in
Bengaluru was tense but buoyant. The agency had set up a
livestream from the control room, and an array of people, including
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, could be seen monitoring telemetry
displays and mingling. The spacecraft was about two kilometers (1.2
miles) above the surface when something went wrong.

The mood in the room darkened instantly. The faces, now serious
and uncertain, prompted tingles of déjà vu in anyone who had
watched the Beresheet livestream five months earlier. All eyes in the
room remained on a massive computer display, where a green dot
representing the Vikram lander now hovered, motionless. The final
data suggested that the lander had deviated from its planned route.

AIJAZ RAHI / AP
I messaged Landsman, whom I’d interviewed earlier in the day, and
asked whether he was watching. It was nearly midnight in Israel.
“Looks too familiar, I’m afraid,” he wrote back. Landsman and his
colleagues believe a technical glitch doomed their lander, but they
can never know the details; the systems that would answer their
questions are likely scattered on the lunar surface.
It was after 2 a.m. in India when, the fate of the Vikram lander still
unclear, Modi gave the head of the space agency a pat on the back
and delivered a pep talk to the team. “You’ve done a great job and
the country is proud of you,” Modi said, according to
a translation by Shiv Aroor, a journalist at India Today. Before the
failed attempt, India had plans for a Chandrayaan-3, another
mission to the moon's south pole.

The Vikram lander now joins the many other artifacts that
humankind has delivered to the lunar surface, whether in one piece
or many. The orbiter of the Chandraayan-2 mission will never touch
down. It is designed to circle the moon until it malfunctions or
deteriorates, keeping vigil over the bits and pieces of a missed
moonshot.