https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/albums/7217772031...

There's also a cool lunar flyover video taken during final deorbit.

Still photography has gotten more convenient since then, but in the agreeable lighting and atmospheric conditions one would encounter while taking a vacation snap outside at noon Cynthian time, image quality now isn't better than then*

*Unless you're willing to spend $10,000+

OP is comparing photography tech that made it to the Moon, so not cheap tech. The "special" way the photos look like is probably more a product of the environment than just the equipment.

it reflects light in (roughly) the direction of light source

so you have /even bigger/ contrast between shadow and its border than you'd expect from "no air to soften shadows with dispersed light"

Also the Hasselblad camera they sent to the moon back then was actually pretty good even by modern standards.

I think it had a 7x7cm film - that's a humongous, 49cm^2 sensor compared to a regular full-frame camera, which clocks in at 8.64cm^2. As far as I can tell, the iPhone's is a tiny 0.25cm^2.

Combine with no-holds-barred lenses and you're bound to get fantastic pictures even six decades ago.

https://www.hasselblad.com/about/history/500-series/

https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/a11/a11-hass.html#:~:text=...

Of course, nothing can touch the light gathering ability of that Zeiss 50mm f/0.7, but then that lens wasn't very sharp anyway and modern digital sensors can go up to way higher ISO than possible with film while still making decent pictures.

- 5cm x 4cm sensor

- 150 MP

- $60k

Nvidia did a great presentation about the lighting for the original. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syVP6zDZN7I

Here's what Firefly uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_photography

Hopefully you can see that from a raw tech level, there's practically no overlap between those things at all. The technology has moved on _completely_.

Kinda related: some years ago NASA published all the Apollo missions pictures. I downloaded all of them (hundreds, maybe bit more), acting as a photo editor then I selected "good ones", cropped them to 16:10 format and made a background picture pack - I'm using it on all my devices since then. If someone is interested, they're published at [0] - feel free to use.

[0]: https://share.icloud.com/photos/0577bWqlyiqqaz9zeI0cEcE7Q

[1]: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5415

[0]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/with/5133...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/54353240540/in/al...

I was a heavy Flickr user, but when Yahoo sold it to SmugMug in 2018, I basically assumed it was going to be either merged out of distinct existence or shuttered. I downloaded an archive of all my stuff and stopped using it altogether. Because what’s the point of using a platform that’s so obviously no longer viable…was my thinking at the time. I would never have guessed it would remain alive this long but it’s still not anything I would want to invest time in or rely on anymore.

CGI animations also add blurring, and even your eyes have an integration time that will make fast moving objects blurry. So your brain good at interpolating blurry edges.

Having too much karma points... ;-)

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/feds-who-forced-ukrain...

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/max-polyakov-and-no...

https://noosphereventures.com/eos-to-create-its-own-radar-mi...

Also:

- Wow but the moon is 3D. Like, when we see shots of Earth, the ground always looks so flat, but the depth of the craters and the heights of the ridges is really, really amazing to see

- ...KSP did a really good job mimicking the real thing

> The terminator is where you'll see the most pronounced shadows cast by the lunar features like craters, mountains, and valleys. This is because the Sun is at a low angle relative to the lunar surface, emphasizing the topography and allowing you to see craters and other features in sharp relief

The pic with the shadow of the lander is really close to what you get out of KSP when you first land on Mun or Minmus. Really really cool. Congrats to everyone who made this happen!

Yes. That flyby video looks almost like taken straight from KSP - the only thing that made my mind stop feeling like I'm watching a Mun landing, was the light reflecting off the metallic surfaces of the actual lander - it looked too computationally expensive for a videogame.

Pro-tip: the full moon isn't so fun to look at, you want some level of crescent moon so you can avoid getting overloaded on the brightness.

(You can also stay up for a few hours and actually observe Io revolving around Jupiter, I think it takes most of the night to get 1/4 of the way around. Pretty obvious revolutions when you keep observing throughout the night.)

I planned to watch the live stream but wasn't able to. The moment of successful landing was quite modest, only a mostly-static screen with telemetrics was shown to the public, but it absolutely felt magical. It feels like the moon is well within humankind's reach by now.

Coincidentally, I found a copy of Uchu Kyodai (by Chuya Koyama) in my local library, and started reading it recently. It's fun to compare the perspectives from more than a decade ago, to the actual development we have right now, regarding space exploration.

(This was posted to another thread, but I moved it here after I realized comments were moved)

It has been for the last 65 years. ;)

That's huge progress!

If that made it "out of reach" back then depends on what you mean with those words, but it's undeniably far cheaper and safer now.

FireFly launched as a private company on a Falcon 9 so their cost was probably a peak of ~$0.07 billion (to maintain units) which may have been able to be privately negotiate downward given the nature of the mission.

Now that we've clearly nailed all 4 of those points, we're starting to see lots more interesting things in space from tourists visiting the ISS, people sending their ashes to space, to doing private space walks and going further into space than any human has since the 70s [1], and now even things like this with a private company landing a payload on the Moon. Many of these things are done with no return beyond doing them.

More specifically though, this is also literally why SpaceX was created. Elon was researching NASA's plans for getting men to Mars. They literally did not exist. He wanted to get society more interested in space and so his idea was to launch a greenhouse to Mars and live-stream it. The capability for that simply did not exist in America, and in Russia the costs were far too high. So SpaceX was born.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris_Dawn

Smallest lunar lander so far is 200kg/440lbs, that's the weight of a carry on full of lead. Besides the Space Shuttle can't go higher or deliver higher than LEO anyway.

You're right that Space Shuttle was a nonstarter for technical reasons, but it doesn't change the core issue. Neither does the mass. Unless you can find other companies willing to share a launch with you, you're paying for a whole rocket. And that's if you can manage to contract a rocket in the first place. As an inconsequential nitpick, no lander weighs 200kg. You're conflating landing mass (of which there's been well smaller than 200kg) with total launched mass. Fuel, thrusters, and so on multiply the weight substantially.

This is why the image of the Moon as a stepping stone to Mars doesn't really make any sense. The Moon is very much 'hard mode', but it's closer. So the main tech issue to make up (long distance travel) is not one that progress on the Moon will go much towards advancing.

This is made even true on the Moon because its low gravity means that even a hair of velocity is going to make you 'bounce' after landing. This is why things like probes and rovers landing (or at least ending up) on their side or even upside down on the Moon is a fairly frequent affair. On Mars (and other places with an atmosphere) you can use atmospheric braking which is essentially just slowing down by bumping into the atmosphere in a controlled fashion. You can even get things like parachutes involved in the process.

The dust storms in Mars are also 'fake' at least as presented in movies/books like "The Martian." Mars has an extremely low atmospheric pressure (relative to Earth) so fiercest dust storm imaginable would feel like nothing more than a slight breeze. The only issue they pose is visibility, and dust accumulating on solar panels. Andy Weir, by the way, was well aware of this when writing "The Martian" which is otherwise a phenomenally well researched hard sci-fi book. I think it's highly telling that he had to intentionally fudge reality to create a crisis on Mars!

Rescue and abort options are also much harder. The moon is close enough to easily resupply or rescue people on the surface, mars is much harder.

But if somehow both of these bodies were orbiting around Earth, Mars would be just orders of magnitude more straight forward than Mars, and I think it's relatively likely we'd already have permanent outposts, if not colonies, there. So the mental model of it being viewed as a stepping stone is somewhat misleading. The Moon is hard!

And also I don't think the distance will be that bad. We've already had 374 day ISS stays which is far longer than any possible transit to Mars (though nowhere near as long as a late-stage mission abort would entail) and the overall effects of such a stay were not markedly different than significantly shorter stays on the ISS. So it seems very unlikely that even a late stage emergency abort would be fatal.

They break through the atmosphere and then all of a sudden it looks like a small globe when the point-of-reference switches to the blackness of space.

Here's a very famous image from Apollo 8:

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/82693/earthrise-rev...

For a different perspective, check out the view of earth/moon from Mars:

https://science.nasa.gov/resource/earth-and-moon-as-viewed-f...

It would be very cool if we are able to properly colonize the moon in my lifetime. Even if we don't have humans living there like in Futurama (as cool as that would be), it would be unbelievably cool if we have constant back-and-forth trips to the moon.

Or we could just blow it up, which might be fun in its own right: https://youtu.be/GTJ3LIA5LmA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIIBBj6KR-Y

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16QpeWjf1Hbxp_15D5Vtx...

I mean, there wasn't really a "reason" to go to the moon in the 60's either. I think I more or less agree with JFK on this:

"Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, 'Because it is there'. Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it"

I could try and find a lot of justifications about medical research or something, and those might be cool, but it would be dishonest if I pitched those as a "reason" to go, because I would want us to return even if those reasons weren't there.

https://youtu.be/4HZAc7EKFJQ

ISRU water to hydrolox to reduce amount of uplift from earth's gravity well?

The moon lacks too much to be self sustainable. Mars is a stretch: it is likely someone will reply that mars isn't possible and they will have good points, so while I have concluded it is just possible I can see the points of those who think it is not.

Imagine stepping outside into a world where absolutely everything is coated in dark gray copy toner that gets ingrained into all that touches it.

I don’t think I could do it due to the anxiety.

The dust would give me some anxiety too but I think it would be worth it.

The relative costs are flipped for putting a human on Mars/moon - the robot is cheaper.

Imagine if we never built ISS because putting a space station in Earth's orbit was a solved problem...

Other options include but are not limited to: Digging massive rivers/canals. Digging a massive harbor. Digging a large hole. Digging through some mountains. Digging holes to store toxic waste.

Truly a revolutionary pair of projects.

Mr Show has held up well, maybe even gotten better with time.

In 3-5 years, once Starship is running continuously, expect a flurry of these types of unique "small" missions.

The future of spaceflight is so exciting.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/s9E8DBK896w

One video is a kid flushing things down a toilet so an adult makes a cardboard toilet and picture cards they can put in. Next was a woman going into a theater and somebody put something in her backpack. Turns out it was a doll. Is anybody else seeing this stuff? What is it? Who's making it?

Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 Lunar Landing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43224107 - March 2025 (40 comments)

Blue Ghost Moon landing Sunday 3:30am EST using Earth GPS lock 238000 miles away - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43222015 - March 2025 (3 comments)

Nyx Space and Rust Power Firefly's Blue Ghost Lunar Landing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43217811 - March 2025 (1 comment)

- https://x.com/Firefly_Space/status/1896127381670367703

- https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/touchdown-carrying-nasa-sc...

For those who don’t live in Texas, many people who live in Cedar Park would say they are from Austin. It’s a suburb to the North. I know an engineer from Firefly from years ago. She was always fascinating to talk to. I also sold my MK3s+ 3D printer to a firefly employee via Craigslist a few years ago.

I’m glad they’re having some success.

https://x.com/Firefly_Space/status/1896158394295390367/photo...

Awe inspiring stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XmhxEDsVTY

Why not hibernate?

(someone go back to Venus, I know it's hard, but someone please)

Getting to the moon at all is a huge accomplishment.

The article actually mentioned IM-1 (though not by name) and got me looking.

How cool is it to have your work preserved for thousands to millions of years, on the surface of the moon?!

I cannot imagine much anything more fun.

Jokes apart, I think anybody getting anything off the ground and out of the planetary gravity well are heroes. It's kind of wild how... mundane... rocketry has become. Between that and always-on nearly-free global video calling from a smart watch, I feel like I'm living in the future of some of the 1950s SciFi books I read as a kid.

"Kings of Space" by Capt. W. E. Johns comes to mind. The smell of that old paperback copy I have transports me to another time.

Video of the earth rising from the horizon reminded me of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech.

Any opensource libraries in that satellite's tech stack will now get to brag about "our code running on the moon" :) I wonder if FireFly team has used AI coding tools in any part of their development process.

A safe bet would be that SQLite is on there. It's already in airplanes / satellites.

https://flic.kr/p/2qP1yLU

https://flic.kr/p/2qJKm4o

It's rare that usage of word "permanent" has this close to an accurate meaning. Complete development of the moon's surface aside, what are the factors what will destroy it? Solar and cosmic radiation? What timescale are we talking about here?

For context, there's roughly a 50% chance of an astronaut being hit by a micrometeoroid large enough to kill them every 1.3 million years of time spent on the moon's surface. There's roughly a 50% chance of a square meter of the moon being hit by a micrometeoroid equavalent to 3 kg on TNT in a billion years.

So, aside from the human intervention, and assuming that the materials can generally withstand radiation... let's say it's 6 sq meters, [0] I know this is not exactly how it works, but if LLMs[1] and my own lacking skills at mathematics are accurate, then ~70 million years? That sounds so much more "permanent" than anything on Earth.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitive_Machines_Nova-C

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/67c51a06-51e8-8012-9f21-c9a428551d... (it would be amazing if someone could verify this math and logic, I cannot)

With that said thermal cycles on the moon are very large, with a range up to 450F. That much thermal expansion and contraction over time is going to be hard on anything not shielded under some soil.

How many cycles would it take to turn into a mound? Would a coherent mound still count as "existing?"

https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/technical-fa...

>Aluminum does not have a distinct fatigue or endurance limit, so its S-N graph curves down from the upper left to the right and continues to curve down lower and lower toward the lower right corner of the graph. This illustrates that it will eventually fail even from low stress applications, given enough of them.

Steel/titanium, if its fatigue tolerance is in the temperature range, would last much longer if not near indefinably until it came to impacts.

Perhaps somebody thinks it would make a good museum piece back on Earth, or some bored spacefaring teen vandals destroy it for the lulz, or religious norms will change and those in power will blow it up to show their rejection of idols of a now forbidden age.

I'd give it hundreds of years, but not thousands.

Landed craft on the moon often carry reflectors that help laser location of the Moon.

Spacecraft that have spent decades the Moon's surface are also going to give valuable clues about the behavior of their materials in these conditions, if / when someone collects and inspects them. Could save quite a bit of uncertainty for a larger project on the Moon.

Also, isn't basically everything you see on the moon some kind of debris? There are no apparent structures there created by complex, interesting processes, such as life, or by interesting geological processes. The spacecraft would be an aesthetical center of the area :)

Surely they'd do it just for the publicity and ability to shut up Joe Rogan and the other nutjobs that consider that landing fake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mmlmxamw_k

Yes, in the same sense that the Pyramids and Stonehenge and the Parthenon are rubbish

On another note, I'm currently reading "Sunburst and Luminary An Apollo Memoir" from Don Eyles, which is a great read that makes you realize the feat it really was at the time.

My main interrogation now (and I've not yet looked anywhere for elements of answer) is why is it so difficult to reproduce with the current tech and scientfic advances ? Is bloatware involved or is the scope really different ?

Even when the moon is finally settled on, I guarantee you that nobody will make any effort to clean it up and throw it away.

It is truely sad that we can be sure that even thousands of years in the future, despite millions of humans looking at it every day, people will rather put a glass box around it, so nobody is bothered by it, than just tossing it into the lunar landfill.