LUNR - Athena is dead

Athena is dead link: https://www.space.com/the-universe/moon/private-intuitive-machines-moon-lander-fell-over-inside-crater-at-lunar-south-pole-photo-reveals . I was invested in this company and made a decent amount of money off of them, until now. Probably slightly red after Thursday and ultimately selling Friday morning.

After having watched the Athena lander try to land on Thursday morning, and watching my a reasonable amount of money die with it, it was a moment for reflection for this company, and really any others. Some assumptions I made on LUNR and this landing:

1.) They learned from Odie, their failed moon landing attempt. Intuitive Machines (IM) did learn, they upgraded cameras and other guidance systems. They got within 400m of their landing sites on something hundreds of thousands of kilometres away! Impressive!

2.) These are literal rocket scientists and engineers, working with NASA and are probably ex-NASA engineers, should be a safe bet after point 1, right?

Learnings after getting hosed Thursday:

1.) Both 1 and 2 are correct. Maybe I missed this, but where were their real world trials of this equipment? Why not try to use the same autonomous landing software with orbits around the earth where you have satellites to communicate with or literally watch with? Or use drones to watch with as it nears a landing destination here on Earth? If there was any activity like this, I would have assumed it would be publicized to help the company stock and profile and also to support the government/private partnership they had, and would have made stock news outlets that I pay attention to; however, maybe I missed it? The Earth has different gravity and an atmosphere, yes, but you could have tested the software here on Earth and recovered the unit that had dummy weights in it instead of a very expensive drill, a mass spectrometer, and a Nokia cellular network inside of it.

2.) During the landing viewing on Thursday, they mentioned setting up multiple lunar satellites around the moon to help with future missions... Why wouldn't you set those up first? Seems like better smaller steps to guarantee these much larger, higher risk missions. Yes, not as sexy as a landing, but probably small (but huge) milestones on the Gantt chart to bigger future missions.

3.) Assuming #1/#2 to be true, and they had no real world test trials or other information to help aid the landing, did NASA, ultimately send all of their paid assets to the moon on largely unproven systems? As an investor in the company (a very small investor), did I just do the same thing?

Not hating on them, I want them to succeed, but it won't be with my money any longer. I hope their contracts don't get cut by Elon/DOGE/etc that think this is a 'wasteful' program after now having two failed missions. Afterall, other competitors landed successfully earlier in the week.

In the current political climate, LUNR seems like a very risky bet at this point, and not an investment, unless there's some laying out of steps to guarantee future success. Given that the federal government is largely their only source of revenue at this point, it's a massive question mark. I'll probably invest in BUD instead at this point, they're on a tear since earning. Even SMCI might be a better gamble.