by Despite the failure of the US’s first commercial lunar lander to ever operate in space, Astrobotic Technology is pressing ahead with its next lunar mission, still on the calendar to launch before the end of the year.
The hardware upgrade for the Astrobotic Griffin Mission One lander is now on display at the private Pittsburgh-based firm and can be viewed from the nearby Moonshot Museum. The upcoming lunar lander, called Griffin, will be the largest lunar lander since the Apollo lunar module.
There’s no doubt about it: Griffin’s upcoming flight is not only a major flight for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) Initiative in which American companies are contracted to deliver science and technology to the lunar surface; it also marks an important bridge to NASA’s Artemis Program of human lunar exploration.
Related: As hawk moon lander lights up in Earth’s atmosphere, Astrobotic was ‘excited for the next adventure’
Lunar machinery
The Griffin spacecraft will be launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket and will carry an Artemis-type lunar rover, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER.
VIPER aims to land near the moon’s south pole, driving around a 100-day mission at Mons Mouton, a flat-topped mountain near the western rim of the Nobile Crater.
NASA sees the robotic rover as an important tool for gathering vital information about the origin and distribution of water ice on the moon. In doing so, VIPER can help gauge the clarity of vision for harnessing lunar resources to sustain human exploration of Earth’s celestial neighbor.
Rough, rocky road
But the path to the moon is a rough and rocky road for Asteroids. The roughly $100 million loss on the Falcon One lunar landing mission was full of highs and lows, said Astrobotic CEO John Thornton.
“It’s very difficult to start these missions,” Thornton told Space.com. “We’re doing it at a fraction of what it normally costs to complete these missions. The challenge is to fly these at the budget that we’re trying to do here. And if we succeed in doing that, that means you can fly again, and again and again.”
The company’s Peregrine lunar lander ran into trouble shortly after taking off on Jan. 8, when United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket sent it to the moon.
Riding atop the inaugural flight of that Vulcan booster was a nail-biter, but they nailed it, Thornton said. However, within hours Hawk was in trouble.
Hawk traps
Shortly after launch, Hawk suffered a propulsion problem, short-circuiting its multi-engine burnout journey before making a soft four-foot landing at the Gruithuisen Domes region of the moon.
“It failed first and then we got 10 days of operations after that. So we got a ton of data to pinpoint what happened. There’s still uncertainty about what that failure was,” Thornton said, though that it is a material failure. , foreign object debris in valve, possibly a design issue. “There are some parts of that you can’t know,” he said.
Flight control teams collected a lot of data and feedback about other spacecraft systems, especially those customized by Astrobotic. “So, luckily, we didn’t lose communication. That was the worst case scenario for debugging the situation.”
Thornton said that a failure review board is now looking at the Peregrine traps, “to make spacecraft better in the future.”
In the troubled final days of the mission, the decision was made to instruct Mission Hawk One to make a destructive, controlled re-entry into the ocean waters of the South Pacific on 18 January. The Falcon carried a total of 20 payloads from seven nations and 16 commercial customers.
Serious progress
Related Stories:
— ULA’s Vulcan rocket launches private US lunar lander, 1st since Apollo, and human remains on first flight
— Who is Astrobotic Technology and what do they do?
— NASA’s ice-hunting VIPER lunar rover gets ready to slither to the launch pad
Despite the loss of Peregrine, Thornton remains bullish about NASA’s CLPS model for doing lunar business.
“I think it’s possible and I believe we’re on the precipice of that as an industry,” Thornton said. “We are making serious progress.”
In light of the February 22 intuitive machines soft landing on the moon to spaceship Odysseus at the south pole region of the moon, what to take Thornton?
“Obviously it’s challenging for a competitor to come much closer to total success than we did,” Thornton replied.
“From an industry perspective, it’s a big one. It says the model is likely to work if given a little more time,” Thornton said. “To me that’s the biggest win we can get … if the industry is successful then, ultimately, Astrobotic will be successful as well.”
Astrobotic offered a final update for the Peregrine Mission One on the company’s website:
“The Blue Hawk flew and Griffin could land. Ad luna do aspera,” the communiqué concludes with a nod to the Star Trek motto, “To the stars through difficulty.”
