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!
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.
