South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
A lot is riding on Astrobotic moon lander set for launch Monday
While United Launch Alliance is gunning for its first successful launch of the new Vulcan Centaur rocket early Monday, NASA and commercial company Astrobotic have their own high hopes for success for the moon-bound payload.
Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology’s Peregrine lunar lander will become the first mission to fly under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract when it takes off on ULA’s Vulcan. The launch is set for liftoff during a 45-minute window that opens at 2:18 a.m. Monday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41.
Limited window backups are available early Tuesday-Thursday before further delays would force a push to Jan. 23. Space Launch Delta 45’s weather squadron forecasts an 85% chance for good launch conditions, which drops to 40% in the event of a 24-hour delay.
Astrobotic’s flight is the first of nine lunar CLPS missions already awarded with the goal that NASA would become a customer of companies amid a growing commercial lunar economy.
“Spaceflight is hard and some very unforgiving business. Even small mistakes can have huge consequences. NASA leadership is aware of the risks and has accepted that some of these missions might not succeed,” said Joel Kearns, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration in the Science Mission Directorate.
Houston-based Intuitive Machines is set to fly what would the second CLPS mission as early as February on a SpaceX Falcon 9 while Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines have second flights along with Texas-based Firefly Aerospace’s first flight all on NASA’s launch schedule before the end of 2024.
“We really do want to try to build this lunar economic sphere of people that will want to use the moon because the more there is of things like that, there’s more direct and indirect benefits in United States,” Kearns said.
Draper Laboratory out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, also has a CLPS mission contract before 2026. NASA plans to announce two additional contracts this year and each year thereafter from among 14 qualified commercial companies as part of what is $2.6 billion budgeted through 2028.
The Peregrine flight was originally given an $80 million fixed price contract, which grew to $108 million when NASA asked for a different landing location.
“We’ve done as much as we possibly can here on Earth to ensure mission success,” said Astrobotic CEO John Thornton. “But we are up against one of the most challeng
ing environments known to man. So we’re very excited to finally take our shot here.”
To work within the budget constraints, Astrobotic has opted to fly on ULA’s first Vulcan mission with new engines from Blue Origin and new boosters from Northrop Grumman. It also brought on non-NASA customers among 20 payloads.
“We’ve had to take certain level of risk along the way,” Thornton said. “We’ve had to keep the program lean the whole way through, but our engineers are certainly creative
and have lots of things that could go sideways, and we’re we’re doing the best we can for those.”
The flight plan is for Peregrine to separate from the rocket’s upper Centaur stage about an hour after liftoff and prep for a translunar injection. It will then travel about 12 days to the moon before entering several weeks of different altitude orbits. The final drop will see the lander descend from 62 miles to the surface in about an hour on Feb. 23.
“Landing on the surface of the moon, of course, has been the biggest challenge that others around the world have faced landing as only about half of the missions that have gone to the surface of the moon have been successful,” Thornton said. “So it’s certainly a daunting challenge. I am going to be terrified and thrilled all at once at every stage of this.”
To date, only the U.S., former Soviet Union, China and most recently India have managed a total of 22 successful soft landings on the moon. That includes the six crewed landings of the Apollo program. Two commercial companies attempted but failed to stick the landing within the last five years.
If it can nail the landing, Astrobotic will then deploy its payloads, which will perform their science for about 10 days, which is the time they will stay within the relatively warm sunlight before dropping into darkness.
Beyond NASA, Astrobotic is carrying payloads hailing from the U.S. and six other countries including the Mexican space agency with five Hot Wheels-sized rovers. Also flying is a larger rover for Carnegie Mellon University. Other payloads come from Japan, Hungary, Seychelles, Germany and the United Kingdom.
“There’s a piece of (Mount) Everest going back to the moon because there was actually an astronaut that brought a piece of the moon to the peak of Everest,” Thornton said.
Even if it fails, though, Astrobotic has no intention of slowing down.
“There’s a train of next launches behind me,” Thornton said. “We have our own launch coming up later this year. So in the event that we have a bad day somewhere along the mission, we’re going to be gathering all of the data that we received up to that point, and we’re going to learn from it and we’re going to help industry learn from that.”
That approach is just what NASA is looking for as well, Kearns said.
“Since we know that the that success is not assured — if there isn’t a successful soft landing on this or another flight — what we want to see is what’s the company doing about it,” he said. “What are they going to do to stick the landing the next time because we’re relying on them.”