@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa No, I didn’t. I will have to go back and watch that to see the details!
By the way, it super annoys me that the illumination angle on the top of the lander (where landing pad lighting doesn’t disguise the sun’s angle) doesn’t match the illumination angle on the Earth. 🤷♂️🤦♂️
By the way, it super annoys me that the illumination angle on the top of the lander (where landing pad lighting doesn’t disguise the sun’s angle) doesn’t match the illumination angle on the Earth. 🤷♂️🤦♂️
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa Also, dust doesn’t billow like that in lunar vacuum. It shoots straight away into the distance at super high velocity at an angle low to the ground. There is no air to hold it up above the ground in billowing clouds.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa Here’s the clip. The final few seconds shows the completely unrealistic billowing dust. But still, it is a thing of beauty with the waltz music. I love it.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa Another thing they got right is that the rocket exhaust was completely invisible. Hurrah for them doing that correctly rather than going for the cheap drama of bright jets shooting out the nozzle. In vacuum, there are no jets since the gas spreads out in all directions, and...
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa ...since it spreads out therefore it immediately cools, and therefore it emits no light. Rocket exhaust is invisible during lunar landings. (I was annoyed by some charts I saw this week showing lunar landers with jets shooting out the engines with Mach diamonds in the jets. Ugh!)
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 6/ Keeping it invisible, as it truly is in real lunar landings, preserved the beautiful feeling of a carefully orchestrated dance, agreeing with the waltz music. Perfecto!
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 7/ In real lunar landings it will not all be waltz music, though. The billowing dust at the end may have agreed with that mood—the final loud musical note at the end of the waltz, but in reality the dust would begin about 40 meters above the surface and shoot in a fast spray.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 8/ Also the rocket exhaust would likely become visible in the final moments as the lander touched down, because it gets trapped between the landing pad and nozzle so it doesn’t spread out and cool at that one spot, and it may erode some pad material, possibly burning some metal.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 9/ I watched the lighting carefully during the descent. It was mostly done consistently with only s few exceptions. It is clear they knew to make it consistent. Thus using Sherlock powers we know they added in the inconsistencies as last-minute editing decisions. See these... 
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 10/ The sun angle on spacecraft and Moon or Earth are consistent in every view although the POV is moving around radically. They were obviously very intentional to get it right. Although...
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 11/...in this one view the spacecraft is moving in a different direction relative to the sun angle than it was in the other images. So they failed to keep spacecraft trajectory angle consistent; they wanted dramatic backlighting. But then more significantly,...
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 12/ ...the sun’s angle on the Earth flips back and forth twice. You can’t say it is a different POV because that is determined by position of the entire Moon as it orbits the Earth. The only exception would be if you flipped your body upside down to swap your left versus right.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 13/ You can tell this lunar outpost is at the Moon’s polar region because the Earth is near the horizon with horizontal lighting. So the 1st and 3rd views must be at one lunar pole while the 2nd is at the opposite lunar pole, i.e., flipped upside down.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 14/ So you would be forced to conclude either the director made a mistake, or that lunar city is on the opposite side of the Moon from where the 1st/3rd lander is landing, so these images show two different lunar landers that have nothing to do with each other.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 15/ But that 2nd image is also the one where the sun angle is internally inconsistent. It shows the lander lit from one angle and the Earth lit from another. Since these are all really supposed to be same lander, its sun angle means the Earth shouldn’t even be in this picture.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 16/ Correction: I meant the 1st one is the one with internally inconsistent sun angles.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 17/ So taking all things together, I think the most likely explanation is that their original, careful work wouldn’t have had the Earth in the 1st view, but in late editing someone decided it would look better with Earth on the horizon so they added it, messing up the lighting.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 18/ So maybe they flipped the Earth upside down in this view from the flight deck, too, to match the other closeup. They couldn’t flip the Earth in this view of the city because then all the lighting in the view would be wrong, and much worse than what they did allow. 🤷♂️
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 19/ But sun angles aside, these hexagonal clusters of small engines are interesting. The hexagonal shields around them are likely heat shields to protect the vehicle from hot plume gas. 👍
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 20/ Many small engines provides redundancy so losing an engine only loses a small fraction of the thrust & doesn’t cause a huge off-center torque on the vehicle. The small engines are easier to swap in space & bring into a shop for humans to repair, great for reusable landers. 👍
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 21/ They showed the use of guidance & navigation to align the spacecraft onto the landing pad. That is awesome. We’ve been saying for years we must have navigation beacons at lunar landing pads because the pad requires pinpoint landing accuracy.👍
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 22/ The landing pad isn’t big enough for this size vehicle. It looks like a 100-200 ton vehicle. The thrust to hold up such a large vehicle in lunar gravity would be able to erode a lot of material around the edges of this pad and violently sandblast all the surrounding hardware.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 23/ It would be damaging everything inside this building plus outside between the door gaps. But the building probably has a floor, so the dust we see lifted in the landing is probably just incidental dust, not lunar regolith. Still, it shouldn’t billow like this.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 24/ Those are some huge doors that are slowly opening by retracting into the slots around the landing pad. It will be vital to keep lunar dust out of the mechanisms yo prevent jamming. Same for all the surrounding buildings & equipment. This is partly why we need landing pads.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 25/ Using photogrammetry we could take accurate measurements, but I will just make estimates instead. Comparing the humans, the windows are about 60 cm high. Comparing the windows, the lander is about 45 m tall. Comparing the lander, the pad is about 90 m wide.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 26/ ...Comparing the pad, the thickness of the doors is about 8 or 9 m thick. This is not bad, for radiation protection. However, they are hollow. Ideally we would want about 10 m solid thickness for radiation protection. Maybe they pump them full of water after they close.😄
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 27/ Then, it would provide adequate radiation protection for the workers who do servicing and repairs on the lander and thus have to stay in that building for long periods of time. Also, the astronauts walking on the surface would want to minimize such radiation exposures.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 28/ That is why we will use lots of co-robotics in lunar and Mars exploration and development. Robots would be outside doing most of the work, while humans only go outside & get radiation exposure in limited doses to keep it acceptable. There should be a robot with these humans.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 29/ Another health issue is low gravity. It would be really hard to provide artificial gravity on a surface outpost like this, so it would not be suitable for long-term habitation, only for shorter visits. Lunar 1/6 g is probably not enough for human health. But...
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 30/ This is why they have rotating outposts like this Stanford Torus, shown earlier in the movie (here: ). This one orbits Earth. They would want one closer to the Moon. That way, Moon workers can commute to the surface but live off-Moon in higher gravity.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 31/ This is the long-term vision of a Lunar Gateway. It makes sense for the humans to stay near the Moon, but in space so a rotating habitat can provide artificial gravity. It will also need radiation shielding. That comes from material brought up from the Moon.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 32/ The 1st Lunar Gateway is a step to greater things. It won’t rotate for artificial gravity, but we can use it to practice flying the reusable landers to & from the surface while refueling them at the Gateway, then lunar mining for fuel, then fueling them on the surface.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 33/ We can use those operations to begin learning how to use lunar resources. We can begin (1) teleoperating robots from Gateway for prospecting & mining on the surface; (2) practice refueling in space and later on the surface;...
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 34/ ...(3) bringing soil & water up from the surface to the Gateway and eventually using it for radiation shielding in space; and more.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 35/ This city is far from where the lander is descending, so apparently there is more than one city on the Moon in this movie. You wouldn’t bring all that metal from Earth, so in the movie they’ve apparently been making metal from the lunar soil. We’re working on that tech now.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 36/ It makes sense that these cities are in the lunar polar region (which we can tell by the Earth near the horizon with horizontal sun angle on the Earth), because that’s where the ice is located. We are already studying how to mine the lunar polar ice and use it as a resource.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 37/ In the lunar polar region the sun almost never sets, and by putting power plants on several hills that are not too far apart you can have perpetual solar energy. These are the so-called “peaks of eternal light”. The sun & ice are both vital, favoring the lunar poles.
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 38/ The 14-earth-day lunar nights (long!) in the non-polar regions would kill plants or require overly gigantic batteries to store enough energy to light the plants. But the polar regions provide perpetual energy for artificial lighting inside greenhouses to grow food. 👍
@albiondumsday @Phil_9000 @esa 39/39 Therefore I‘d say it got almost everything right. Just one late edit where they added the Earth on the horizon where it shouldn’t have been visible, which created inconsistent lighting angles, the pad is a bit too small (but not bad), and the billowing dust. The rest 👍👍👍
