First commercial moon landing is unacceptable after spacecraft suffers ‘critical loss’ of fuel

Astrobotic Technology, the company behind the lunar lander that wanted to be the first US to return to the moon, officially admitted that it would not reach its final goal.

Late Monday, the Pittsburgh-based firm issued a statement, saying that a persistent leak of propellant was causing the Falcon Lander’s Height Control System thrusters to “operate well beyond their expected lifespans.”

The company said the lander would only be able to operate another 40 hours at most.

“At this time, the goal is to get the Falcon as close to lunar distance as we can before it loses its ability to maintain its solar position and subsequently loses power,” the company said.

The historic attempt to return to the lunar surface appeared to have begun successfully on Monday after it lifted off at 2:18 a.m. ET aboard a Vulcan Centaur rocket developed by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin (LMT ) and Boeing (BA).

The launch at Cape Canaveral, Fla., was the inaugural trip for the Vulcan Centaur and a victory for United Launch Alliance, which aims to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to bring payloads to space.

But Astrobotic’s lunar lander hit a major snag hours later after suffering a problem with its propulsion system.

In a statement, the said company the “critical loss of propulsion” system failure prevented the spacecraft from aiming at the sun, a function critical to generating solar energy to power the lunar lander.

On Monday evening, Astrobotic shared the first image captured by the Falcon in space, saying that the spacecraft’s battery was fully charged. The company also said it would use Peregrine’s current power to “perform as many payload and spacecraft operations as possible.”

The company worked to evaluate its options while trying to stabilize the issue throughout the day, but ultimately concluded that the leak was too significant.

This incident is a major setback for the US effort to return to the moon, more than 50 years after the Apollo mission. Astrobotic wanted to be the first commercial space company to land an aircraft on the surface of the moon, with a moon landing expected for February 23.

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“It took a while for the technology to advance to the point where we could get to the surface of the moon affordably, on a regular basis,” CEO John Thornton said in an interview with Yahoo Finance ahead of the launch. “The stars have aligned for the moon, if you will.”

Thornton and his team placed their first bet on the lunar surface Peregrine, a small-class spacecraft developed within its 47,000-square-foot facility, although Astrobotic noted that it had ambitions beyond a lunar landing, including building infrastructure in anticipation of astronauts and space. tourists end up spending longer periods there.

“To crack the moon nut, we need the infrastructure and the resources to start working,” Thornton said. “The more we can extract from our inflated reliance on earth’s resources and travel into space, the more we will become true space explorers and ultimately space settlers.”

If the Falcon were to land, it would be a major milestone in the private space race that has made the world a $470 billion industry.

Although the early Apollo missions were driven by government agencies such as NASA, the rapid growth of private space companies has led to a boom in new missions from private-public partnerships, focused on scientific research and space exploration. Musk’s SpaceX alone has operated eight manned space flights to the International Space Station in partnership with NASA.

However, commercial success on the moon remains elusive. An attempt by Japan’s ispace to land the first commercial lander on the surface of the moon in 2023 failed when its lunar lander Hakuto-R miscalculated the altitude and crashed.

Astrobotic said it received multiple contracts with NASA worth about $450 million before the launch. For the Falcon mission alone, NASA paid Astrobotic $108 million to send research instruments to the moon as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

On X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, NASA said it was working with Astrobotic to better understand the issue of propulsion. The space agency reiterated its support for Constellations, recognizing the challenges of space missions.

But Thornton suggested the potential consequences of a failed mission earlier this year, telling CNN that failing to land on the moon would have “some impact” on “the company’s ability to achieve additional missions in the future.”

“It certainly wouldn’t be the end of the business, but it would certainly be challenging,” he said.

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