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What makes a Moon landing mission “successful”?
Landers from Firefly and ispace are now in space. Both will reach for the Moon. One thing that is notable about both ispace’s and Firefly’s public communications is that they have clearly laid out the milestones and success criteria of their respective missions — (ispace, Firefly) — in terms of specific events.
Note that ispace even went ahead and included a table which lists specific actions or criteria to be met for each of those milestones:
This exercise is something the publicly traded company also did during its first Moon mission. It respectfully stuck to its success criteria despite the outcome of a failed landing. But this wasn’t the case when the Odysseus spacecraft from US-based Intuitive Machines attempted its first Moon landing as part of NASA CLPS, wherein the publicly traded company as well as NASA retrospectively skewed…