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When a rocket makes its first liftoff attempt on Monday, it will carry nothing less than the first lunar lander launched from the United States since NASA’s final Apollo mission in 1972.
The stakes are high.
The success of the rocket, developed by a Lockheed Martin and Boeing joint venture called United Launch Alliance, is critical to that company’s future and its desire to dominate SpaceX in the commercial launch industry.
The lunar lander, built by a small Pittsburgh company Astrobotic Technology, could be the first commercially developed spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon.
NASA has sponsored the development of a small fleet of such privately developed lunar landers – with the aim of using them to give the US a presence on the moon amid a new international space race starting in 2023.
And while NASA’s program isn’t dependent on a single lander making a successful touchdown, this first robotic mission could set the tone and pace for the space agency’s renewed efforts to explore the moon robotically before it tries to bring astronauts. later returned to the lunar surface. ten years.
Astrobotic’s robotic lunar lander, Peregrine, is scheduled to launch aboard a ULA Vulcan Centaur rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 2:18 a.m. ET Monday.
Recent forecasts indicated an 85% chance of clear weather for takeoff. Back-up shipping opportunities are also available in the coming days.
The path forward
Experts across the space industry, including Astrobotic CEO John Thornton, have compared the odds of successfully landing any spacecraft on the moon to flipping a coin.
“This is really like 50-50 shots on a target kind of approach – where it’s really more about the successful industry, not any specific mission,” Thornton told CNN in a telephone interview 2 January.
That said, Thornton said, “we put everything we can into this mission.”
Landing on the moon is a complex endeavor.
If the launch starts as scheduled on Monday, Vulcan Centaur will put the lunar lander on its way to the moon – putting it into a so-called translunar injection orbit. That involves a precisely timed engine burn that will push the Falcon lander onto an Earth orbit path that will allow it to sync with the moon some 384,400 kilometers (238,855 miles) away.
From there, starting about an hour after launch, the Hawk lander will separate from the rocket and create its own trajectory, using onboard thrusters to set itself on a precise course toward the moon.
After reaching the moon, the Falcon – named after the falcon, the fastest bird in the world – will spend some time in lunar orbit before attempting a landing on 23 February.
The target landing site is a patch of the moon’s near-side surface that stretches a few kilometers wide, Thornton said, but the lander will test technology that could provide a more precise landing zone on future missions.
The final moments before the spacecraft reaches the lunar surface are the most important. Two failed lunar landing attempts last year, one by a Japan-based company and another by Russia, highlighted the difficulty of maintaining precise control of a vehicle as it moves in for touchdown, with both attempts by crash into the moon.
New space racing
This mission will be the first attempt at a lunar landing – robotic or crewed – for the United States in five decades.
And the mission comes amid renewed international pressure to explore the moon.
While Japan-based company Ispace and Russian space agency Roscosmos both failed in their moon landing attempts last year, India’s Chandrayaan-3 made a safe landing in August. With that success, India became the fourth nation – after China, the former Soviet Union and the United States – to put a vehicle on the moon.
So far in the 21st century, only India and China have made soft landings.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, could complete its first lunar landing this month, using its “Moon Sniper” spacecraft that has already been en route for months.
But NASA hopes to catch up quickly using the commercially developed robotic landers it has sponsored. Besides Peregrine, the space agency has contracts with Texas-based companies Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines. The latter could launch its lunar lander as early as mid-February.
Those contracts, all part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, aim to significantly reduce the cost of building a lunar lander — especially compared to the multibillion-dollar effort that he to create the Apollo-era lander.
Peregrine and the other CLPS landers aim to be much cheaper, with NASA agreeing to pay only one fixed-price contract to its partner companies.
(For example, Astrobotic’s contract for this mission was $108 million, more than NASA originally promised. But agency officials said the contract was renegotiated amid the pandemic.)
“This is one of many relatively inexpensive missions that will be sent to the surface of the moon to try to break the paradigm to try to find a new price point,” Thornton told CNN.
Other robotic lunar missions for CLPS could take off later in 2024, including a golf cart-sized rover aboard another lunar lander for Astrobotic called Griffin.
This rover will look at the moon’s south pole for water ice — a search that is a key feature of the 21St– century space race. Water ice could be used to sustain future astronaut colonies or converted into rocket fuel for missions deeper into space.
It will be a cornerstone of NASA’s lunar efforts to pave the way for humans to return to the surface under the Artemis program. NASA aims to send astronauts on a mission to fly by the moon as early as late 2024 before humans return to the surface later this decade.
Peregrine Science
For this mission, the Astrobotic Hawk lander is heading to a lunar region called Sinus Viscositatis, otherwise known as the “Bay of Stickiness”.
The name is a tribute to the nearby Gruithuisen Domes, a unique lunar feature that scientists suspect was formed by sticky magma.
The Falcon will host 10 science payloads, five of which are NASA-sponsored experiments. They include two instruments that will monitor the radiation environment, “which will help us better prepare to send crewed missions back to the moon,” Paul Niles, NASA project scientist for the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program, told during a briefing on Thursday.
Other instruments launched by the space agency will analyze the composition of the lunar soil, looking for water and hydroxyl molecules. NASA will also study the moon’s ultra-thin atmosphere.
Thornton said the Hawk vehicle will operate for about 10 days on the lunar surface until the region is plunged into lunar night, a period when it will be too cold for instruments to operate.
Human remains and memories
Although NASA is the main financial backer of the mission, the space agency is only one customer involved.
Also on board will be scientific experiments and commercial cargo from other nations, including Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
Astrobotic has partnered with German shipping company DHL, for example, to bring small souvenirs to space, including “photos and novels of student work and a piece of Mount Everest”.
Notably, Peregrine will also transport human remains on behalf of two commercial space burial companies – Elysium Space and Celestis – a move that has sparked opposition from the Navajo Nation, the largest group of Native Americans in the United States.
The group argues that allowing the remains to touch the surface of the moon would be against many indigenous cultures, who consider the moon sacred. Celestis offered to transport ashes to the moon for prices starting around $13,000, according to its website.
Thornton, Astrobotic’s CEO, told CNN that the landing attempt will be a surreal moment — the culmination of 16 years of work by the company’s employees.
The most difficult obstacle to overcome during the Astrobotic expedition, he noted, was convincing people that a Pittsburgh-based company of fewer than 300 people was capable of creating a lunar lander at all.
“We got a lot of people who doubted us and laughed at us along the way,” he said.
But Thornton is optimistic that success will lead to a growing lunar economy, helping NASA achieve its goals while encouraging the commercial sector to explore possibilities on the moon.
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