I think it’s pretty impressive they managed to do a soft KSP-style landing without an engine nozzle.
Yeah, that’s the bigger deal. They lost an engine and still managed a soft landing. They just landed upside down – but the solar cells might still work.
And for the record, the lander was supposed to land on its side. It’s designed to do a quarter turn just before it touches the ground, but because of a slope, it rolled a little bit further than they wanted.
It was so close to perfect!
It’s actually amazingly impressive! In contrast, in the past few years Israel, India and even Russia have had disappointing failures trying to land on the moon - not because they’re engineers aren’t as good, but because it’s just really freaking hard to get right and a lot of unexpected things can happen.
The Japanese team lost an engine nozzle and with it about 40% of their thrust as they were mid landing. Losing 1 out of 2 engines is the kind of critical malfunction that usually dooms a mission (like it did once for India); but regardless, their software was able to adjust on the fly, automatically switch into a different flight mode, and still put the lander exactly where they wanted it.
This is a remarkable success where so many talented others have failed. In a couple of weeks, the sun will be shining from the right direction to hit their solar panels and their mission should continue!
Why does a country with no ballistic missile program go for this sort of feat? Japan really has the tech base and uranium reprocessing ability to rocket into having ICBMs in no time.
Japan got struck twice with thermonuclear bombs in world war 2, in 2 cities named Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Look it up. They are very much against nuclear arms in general since then.
