Russia seems to have lost contact with its first lunar probe in half a century

"The management team is currently analyzing the situation."

See full article...

 

[DovePig]

Not wanting to jinx it by saying it loud, but I am still hoping for a nice and very energetic lithobraking manoeuvre from Luna 25. Just losing comms with it still being in the pre‑landing orbit would be kinda anti‑climatic!

That would serve them right, IMO. Although I am pretty sure TASS would still try to twist a high‑speed lithobraking crash event into a "very successful landing" somehow...

 

[DovePig]

Russia's first Lunar mission.

Calling the previous Soviet missions "Russian" is rather inaccurate, especially considering that most of the key people in the Soviet space program were Ukrainian.

This and this again!

Russia singlehandedly and quite neo‑colonialy appropriating all of the Soviet achievements that came out of CCCP's constituent nations is just so on par with their current propaganda.

Probably the best to call them "Muscovy", that's about right. High hopes here all their colonies break free soon, they surely deserve the last decolonisation that there is.

 

[DovePig]

Has an appropriate scapegoat been selected and disseminated to keep everyone's story straight?

Nope, they are still choosing the appropriate basement window for the inevitable fall from grace.

 

[DovePig]

I don't know the exact IAU rules on naming topographic features on moons and planets, but if it ever crashes, can we please name the resulting small crater Zmiinyi? I'd definitely vote for that!

"Putin Khuilo crater" would work as well, but I think there might be some IAU rule about very offensive swearwords (i.e. "Putin")...

 

[DovePig]

Technically and legally speaking, Russia is a successor state of the USSR - UN Security Council is probably the most pronounced example of the fact.

Ahem, technically and legally speaking, that's not as clear‑cut as you make it sound to be. Like any international legal matter, there are a few caveats and objections to it...

 

[DovePig]

I'm pretty sure that if the probe was in a low lunar orbit, it will find a way to impact the surface soon enough. Orbits around the moon aren't particularly stable. What would be awesome is if other countries' probes could find the Russian lander and track it to the very end. Perhaps we can get some spectroscopy of the ejecta and get useful information out of the event.

I'd have though the emission spectra of S. tuberosum are pretty well characterised by now, but what do I know ;-)

 

[DovePig]

Also, the launch complex is in Kazakhstan.

Nothing wrong with having a space launch complex in a friendly neighbouring country...

...except perhaps not paying for the bills and a panache for invading your neighbours, that is!

 

[DovePig]

Sadly, the missile sent towards Chernihiv hit its target and successfully killed 100 civilians including children. If only that one was as faulty as Luna-25.

As much abhorrent as thar strike was, please let's keep the numbers straight: the last official toll was around 7 civilians killed and 117 wounded so far. Which is a lot by any count, obviously, and quite inexcusable. The numbers might change yet, of course – probably quite a bit upwards, unfortunately, but please let's keep it official.

 

[DovePig]

Not according to the new Russian school textbooks.

Do they say that radar was invented by Radar Radiovich Radiovochenko by any chance?

 

[DovePig]

But at least there's now a new crater on the moon, and the discovers get naming rights!

May I suggest "Putin's Hubris" as a good first choice of name for the new geological feature?

Sorry, I already called dibs on naming the tiny crater "Putin Khuilo" a few pages back ;-)

 

[DovePig]

After their victory, I am dreaming about a future Ukrainian Moon‑landing mission. Preferably to the very same spot Luna‑25 crashed into, raising a nice flag there. Heck, they might get to even name the recent impact crater...

 

[DovePig]

Republicans are anti-climatic.

The scenario you describe would be anti-climactic.

You shuold have seen all the ohter tyops and erorrs I freqeuntly make in my posts. Let's just say I have a panache pnechant for it!

 

[DovePig]

One more piece of evidence

Spoiler: bunch of dpishit fake moon landings conspiracy shit

we never had manned missions past the van Allen belt, noone would survive this, and the whole moon landings were done with Kubrick on a filmset, 2 germans carried the lies, von Braun the chief rocket scientist and Kurt Debus he was first director of Nasa/Kennedy Space Center(until 1974), both germans from Peenemünde rocket test center, both were in the Waffen SS.
And you believe still in manned moon missions?
(in the image von Braun on the left and Kurt Debus on the right) the 2 Nationalsozialists who carried the moon lies,
View attachment 61429

Careful there with uncovering "The Truth", Kathi!

Ars already knows you are from Deutschland, you having helpfully provided that info yourself in your profile.

If you continue to post more posts uncovering the global conspiracy, Ars will use the signalling laser on their orbital HQ to inform their assigned contact in BMI's KBSt, who will promptly read all your posts and alert the Abteilung IS of the Bundesministerium des Innern.

Next you know, there is a black helicopter silently hovering in your backyard and GSG 9 stormtroopers cuff you and take you into a secret rectal probing and interrogation facility in the top‑secret underground green oasis on Spitzbergen (what did you really think the Svalbard Global Seed Vault really was, you dummy? Storage for plant seeds? lol).

Maybe you think that as possibly a Reichsbürger sovereign citizen, government black helicopters have no jurisdiction over you. Well, the lizard people behind it all certainly do! And they will gladly probe prove that to you over and over.

Take that as a friendly advice.

You don't really want to go there, and don't ask me how I kno...#$%#$%#$%!@#... dddzzzzwwww... INITIALISING... ERROR 0x666 – ALEPH‑LEVEL SECRET INFORMATION BREACH DETECTED... PERPETRATOR IDENTIFIED... TARGET LOCATED... MAXIMUM FORCE ADVISED... DISPATCHING KILLER DRONES... 10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

 

[DovePig]

If you don't, explain where all of this cheese we consume has been mined from.

Well, given that most of what North Americans call "cheese" tastes like rehydrated moon dust, I am not really that surprised...

(I'll go get my coat and make a hasty French British exit)

 

[DovePig]

Good. Fuck em.

Eww, not even in a space suit.

 

[DovePig]

o_0 ...?

PSA: Substances of this category are meant for bonding two surfaces together, not recreational inhalation. Additionally, it would seem that adding potato to the manufacturing process greatly increases the negative effects on users' health.

Не нюхайте клей, дети!

Wie bekifft kann man denn so früh am Sonntagabend sein, dass man solch einen geistigen Dünnpfiff daherlabern müsste?

Danke – loved learning your Dünnschiss (?) euphemism, which I didn't know myself – shows that German can be a very inventive and highly poetic language, contrary to the stereotypical view of it ;‑)

 

[DovePig]

Using Wikipedia numbers ...
Soviet Union = 22.4E6 km²
Russia = 17.1E6 km²

17.1/22.4 = 76.3%

Ahem, now go subtract Sakha, Buryatia, Chechnya, the other 18 "formally independent" republics of the Russian Federation, the autonomous Oblasts, Okrugs and Krais and other annexted territories, and you pretty much end up with Moscow and its boundary ringroad...

 

[DovePig]

Oh don’t give me that nonsense. First off, processed cheese is still cheese. I’ve seen it made.

Second, I can get better “European” cheeses in America than I can import from across the pond.

Apologies, but if you can't just take a friendly cheesy jab (even if somewhat smelly, I'd admit), it's not exactly my fault. But I am willing to let it pass – please don't acidify our PoV differences, as I don't want our intercontinental friendship to fester. It would be a pita if we soured our relations over such a matter. It's simply better to coagulate together – can't we all just be briends?

Fromage, DovePig.

 

[DovePig]

I admit that my use of the word "ethics" is rather idiosyncratic, and is not the same as legal or medical ethics as officially established. I've actually been casting around a bit for a word to differentiate fundamentally humane and benevolent behavior from "morals," which is anything but objective, even in the ways you used it in your post. I consider morality inferior because it is essentially local -- it's defined by the practices and customs of a particular society. The Aztecs had a moral system quite different than that of the Hindus, for example. When we say something is "immoral" we have to set that within a cultural context.

What I have identified as "ethics" (and if you have a better word I'd love to adopt it) is based on common humanity, which transcends local cultures. The Aztec practices of human sacrifice were good and moral in their own context, but that context was rooted in scientific ignorance, tribal authoritarian hierarchy, and religious superstition. A culture with a scientific understanding of climate, for example, cannot morally justify making human sacrifices to the rain god. So morality is necessarily relative. Since my view of ethics transcends local culture, being based on what is beneficial for humans regardless of their ephemeral and superficial social belief systems, it will subsume morality and transcend it.

The question becomes... can a moral sytem itself be evil? If you make a distinction between morality, and * whatever word you want to use that overlies it* then yes, a moral system can be evil. The Aztec system, the Nazi system, both considered themselves moral, but they could not be ethical under the structure I imagine.

But yeah, it's not the best word I could have chosen.

Now we are getting into philosophy. Ethics are universal, morality is local.

 

[DovePig]

The "Golden Rule" is ethics, not morality. It essentially is the basis of ethics. If you treat everyone equally shitty, and expected to be treated just as shitty in return, you're following the Golden Rule, and you're being ethical, though you're probably violating most moral codes.

You mixed up the two. Your hypothetical example might be still be moral by some shitty moral codes, but it would still be shitty according to ethics. As in the philosophy, the study of right and wrong behaviour.

If you treated everybody equally shitty, you would be "ethical" only as in within the purview of ethicists, the philosophers. Not ethical in the sense of doing right.

 

[DovePig]

FFS, why does seem the usually cognisant Ars commentariat tend to totally mix up "ethics" and "morals"?

Ethics is a branch of philosophy, concerned with the search for what is right and wrong. A search, like all philosophy – as ontology might not definitely answer the nature of being, so ethics might not answer all the trolley problems and others, even as it strives to.

Morals are more or less a moral code, specific to some society. It could be totally moral to kill firstborns in a certain (shitty) society. It could be totally immoral to help the homeless in a certain (equally shitty) society. @llanitedave is right on that one, IMHO (though I might have missed the earlier posts that actually started this tangent).

Perhaps there might be a language barrier causing all the confusion? In my primary language (not English) and philosophy lessons, the distinction between ethics and morals was always pretty clear.

 

[DovePig]

The entire branch of discussion started from a statement about the "higher" morality of one code vs. another. Kind of, by definition, each morality is superior to all others from within the society that subscribes to either moral code. That was the point of my original objection. There is no objective higher morality.

Ah, I see, thanks. I'll still have to dig deeper into that tangent, it's been pretty interspersed among all the 15‑pages of snarky Roskosmos comments there so I might have missed a lot of it ;-)

I'd quite agree that there can be no superior morality per se, or by definition, as all moral codes are inherently bound to their societies and obviously considered superior there. But one moral code can still be much less ethical than the other, at least per most philosophies of ethics and their understanding of it. Like it might still be "moral" for Russia to try to genocidally annex a neighbouring country per Russian moral code (which would still be considered the superior code among Russia itself and the vatniks), but that doesn't make it any less unethical in the general sense, because it deprives both the country and its citizens of choice. Like the choice to exist, the choice to not be tortured or raped, et cetera. And choice and existence are pretty high up on most of the philosophy branches...

Ethics: will this action make me an asshole and possibly upset the balance of our society?

Morals: does god want me to do this or not?

You can substitute "god" for "the party" or "Putler" or whatever else there, it works the same way. It's still the 'good' old "XXX told me to do it" excuse...

ETA: And no, ethics originally strived to transcend the whole "our society" (and many branches still try), as unless you try that, you are back to just morals, which are still bound to the society in question.

If I may paraphrase you, "will this action make me an asshole" works pretty fine from an ethics point of view, IMO ;-)

 

[DovePig]

Even that approach has its problems. For example, would it have been more ethical to avoid upsetting the balance of Nazi society, or to overturn it in favor of a human rights respecting free democracy?

The latter, of course!

Unless perhaps you were Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's 'progressor' hero stuck on a "Nazi" (more like thinly‑veiled Soviet) planet in their Inhabited Island novel, where your overturning the regime makes it all even much worse (or does it?). Ah, the questions, questions...

Reminds me that as much as I enjoyed philosophy at the uni, I am glad I didn't choose it as my major! Debating with a philosophy‑major ex was enough of a headache for me (they were usually right and I conceded defeat) – can't even think of just what a quagmire some possible (highly unlikely) future intergalactic ethics might be ;-)

 

[DovePig]

Philosophers use the words "ethics" and "morality" in various overlapping senses. They often use them with the senses more or less reversed from what you say above.

It's common to argue whether something is or is not actually "immoral," which isn't just quibbling about various readings of some arbitrary societal rule book.

One sense of "ethics" (as often used to talk about "professional ethics") is an agreed-upon set of fairly specific principles applicable to certain people in certain roles (e.g., for physicians, about informed consent, not hitting on their patients), hopefully grounded in more basic and not-wrong principles of morality.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says:

the term “morality” can be used either

1. descriptively to refer to certain codes of conduct put forward by a society or a group (such as a religion), or accepted by an individual for her own behavior, or
2. normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational people.

and IMO that's just scratching the surface.

I'd essentially agree it can be a mess of terms at times – as human languages tend to be. IIRC both 'ethics' and 'morals' come from the same (if different languages') root for basically "custom". Yet the common meaning of them is often (but not always) different. I like to differentiate the two as I wrote above, for simplicity's sake of online discussion (as I feel differentiating between a 'custom' and 'mostly universal ethics' is important), but even in the very field of ethics their use can be a bit fuzzy. See "moral psychology" and "professional ethics" you mentioned, et cetera. But for all the confusion, at least IIRC in philosophy in my language, there is (I think) a slight, but significant agreement on the difference between the two terms. Could be a bit arbitrary and a simplification, but I think it has a point. Of course, some philosophy schools might not agree, and as I wrote earlier, I am just a laic in that field.

And yes, terms like "professional ethics" could muddle the semantics up quite a bit...

 

[DovePig]

The philosophers I've talked to tend use "moral" to talk about the more basic and general thing, and "ethics" when talking about more specific codes or systems of thought. It has always struck me as weird that the field is often known as "ethics," because that's not usually how philosophers actually talk about it.

I've heard it the other way (with "ethics" as the broader term) mostly from non-philosophers who (unlike philosophers) are allergic to the words "moral" and "immoral" because it makes them think of dipshit codes of biblical sexual morality, sex as sin, obedience to God's arbitrary dictates as the highest virtue, etc.

Philosophers, in my experience, use the words "moral" and "immoral" more freely and unironically, and generally aren't worried about what people do with their genitals or what prophets say a god wants; that kind of bluenose "morality" is usually not even on the radar. Given that context, the words "moral" and "immoral" tend to have much more force than "ethical" and "unethical," because they're more directly about what's actually right and wrong (and why) vs. what violates some specific rule in a legalistic code by crossing some arbitrary line drawn through a grey area. "Ethics" can mean the whole schmear, but often has a whiff of being about the semi-arbitrary details.

Interesting – my (admittedly quite limited) academic experience has been to the contrary, in terms of the usual meanings of the two terms' use in philosophy. "Ethics" supersedes "morality", as in (oversimplified) the "science of studying morality". Hence the commonplace use of "ethics" as different from "morals", outside (and often inside) of philosophy (where the terms might be much more strictly defined still).

Could really be a language or cultural thing – no idea! Philosophy, as much as it likes to tend to strive for the ToE or whatever, tends to lug quite all the language baggage along with it. Which is pretty much understandable, IMO, but it doesn't make it all easier.

 

[DovePig]

How well does NASA know the impact site? LRO could image it within a week or so if they knew where to point the camera. But NASA wasn't tracking it, it was most definitely not on course to an announced landing site, and I doubt the Russians are sharing their estimated location of the crash site.

Technical question – was it visible from Earth and would any impact be possibly visible by amateur telescopes looking for stuff like meteorite impacts? I pretty much guess not, even for the latter (I think the energy would be way too low to produce even any barely visible flash there), but not really sure.

 

[DovePig]

I understand the motivation, but there are problems with that.

Normal people understand moral vs. immoral as being strongly about what's right or wrong, often very right or very wrong. It's not clear to me that they have the same clear sense of ethical vs. unethical. I don't, myself, so I don't assume they do.

To me, being "unethical" can sounds like cutting some corners here and there, maybe in ways that don't matter too much. I would guess (but don't know) that a lot of other people react similarly. "Unethical" seems like weak tea.

I don't think we should give up the high ground of using the language of morality and immorality. IMO the problem is not that morality and immorality aren't what actually matters. The problem is that many people are mistaken about what is or isn't immoral. Butt sex isn't immoral. The powerful not giving the weak a fair shake IS immoral.

The problem with Falwell's "Moral Majority" wasn't that they were moral; it was that they weren't. They pretended to be moral, but were self-righteous hypocrites promoting a "morality" that was profoundly wrong.

We should take back the language of morality from the bluenoses, and not let it seem like we don't care about morality. Of course we do, enough not to let them own the concept or the word. It's not that we don't care about morality. We care enough to not accept bullshit standards of morality.

You might not agree it's worth fighting that fight, for those words, but I'm never going to agree that they own "morality" and I just have "ethics." That is not true, and it's not how the definitions actually go.

Often you can bypass that distinction, and just talk about right and wrong, but IMO you shouldn't get twisted in knots avoiding talking about being moral, and the last thing you should do is say anything that sounds like you're "not moral." You should usually say you disagree with THEIR "morality."

(This reminds me of weird knots some atheists twist themselves into to avoid using the word "believe" and especially the phrase "believe in." There's an unfortunate meme in atheist circles about saying you don't "believe" anything, you just "accept" some things "as true," as if there was a difference. Those atheists are lettiing religious people ruin a perfectly good and necessary word by association with religious belief.)

I guess I get your point now, even though I might still not totally agree with it from my PoV.

At the very least this tangent has been indeed interesting, even from the language perspective.

The gist of the very article we comment under was pretty clear, and there's only so much that could have been added on how much Russian space programme sucks big time, especially after the (predicted by page one) litho‑braking manoeuvre.

So I did quite enjoy this philosophy tangent, as much as I enjoyed posting crash memes in the first few pages of the comments. There is only so much you can say about a Luna‑25 litho‑brake after fifteen pages, so ethics was a welcome diversion.