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Curiosity might be a roaring success so far, completing what must be the most complex remote landing procedure ever conceived, but not everything’s going quite so swimmingly at NASA. Watch the first free flight test of the new “eco-friendly” moon lander that’s designed to drop cars onto the Moon — it wasn’t pretty.
This isn’t the first time Morpheus has flown, and no I don’t mean leaping across tall buildings in the Matrix — NASA’s had many successful tethered flight tests, but this was the first free flight test sans tether. It looks OK for a second, then over balances, smashing into the ground, catching fire and eventually exploding in a ball of hot metal shards.
Back to the drawing board it looks like guys; at least you put on an amazing, if incredibly costly, firework show for the rest of us. [YouTube via Gizmodo Australia]
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And BOOM! goes the dynamite!
Well done NASA. The Mythbusters would be proud.
I’d say it worked perfectly. Right up to the point where the flight test engineers forgot that Earth has an atmosphere and that it moves! It just blew over!
Ha, that’s true. No real wind to speak of on the Moon.
There must be – How else does that flag from MTV stay ‘fluttering’
I laughed, but I felt bad about it.
Do you think the whimpering sound around 0:40 is the engineers crying.
Either that or the accountants.
What large balls it has..
I’d like to retract my previous comment about it being wind-related, it’s got nothing to do with it at all.
This thing failed because all the people at NASA who can count were working on Curiosity and they were left with the innumerate numpties. (Listen to the first four seconds)
Hahaha +1
Ouch. Suspect NASA will be advertising for a new software engineer who’s good with jet propulsion and thrust vectoring. Shame I know nothing about jet propulsion or thrust vectoring.