The countdown to launch is on. United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket has been rolled to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Area Drive Station forward of its early Monday morning launch, a mission that might finish with the primary absolutely non-public spacecraft touchdown on the moon.
Vulcan’s main payload is Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander. If all goes to plan, Peregrine will embark on a journey to the moon over the span of round 1.5 months, earlier than making an attempt to land on the floor on February 23. The 2 corporations had been concentrating on a Christmas Eve launch, however ULA determined to postpone attributable to floor system points.
That’s how we roll. #ToryTimelapse #VulcanRocket pic.twitter.com/3bz9LgMZ0r
— Tory Bruno (@torybruno) January 5, 2024
“In the event you’ve been following the lunar business, you perceive touchdown on the Moon’s floor is extremely troublesome,” Astrobotic CEO John Thornton stated in a press launch final month. “With that stated, our workforce has constantly surpassed expectations and demonstrated unimaginable ingenuity throughout flight critiques, spacecraft testing, and main {hardware} integrations.
“We’re prepared for launch, and for touchdown.”
ULA and Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic should not the one corporations with a lot using on Monday’s launch. This may also be the primary time Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engines take flight on Vulcan’s first-stage booster (after years of delays), and the primary mission as a part of NASA’s program to kickstart payload supply to the lunar floor.
That program, Industrial Lunar Payload Companies (CLPS), has collectively doled out a whole lot of thousands and thousands to spur non-public improvement of moon landers. For this mission, Astrobotic was awarded $79.5 million from NASA in 2019.
The mission is slated to take off at 2:18 AM ET Monday. NASA will livestream the mission on its Youtube channel.
The launch would be the first of many heading to the moon this yr. Different lunar launches slated for 2024 embrace Intuitive Machines IM-1 lander, which is scheduled for liftoff on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in February; Japanese agency ispace’s second lunar mission (their first lander crashed into the lunar floor shortly earlier than landing); and Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander within the third quarter of 2024. (Each Intuitive Machines’ and Firefly’s missions are a part of the CLPS program.)
With such a lineup, it’s extremely probably that 2024 would be the yr {that a} non-public firm lands a spacecraft on the moon for the primary time, and the primary time an American entity has gone to the lunar floor since 1972.
Astrobotic will try to land Peregrine close to a area of the moon referred to as the Gruithuisen Domes, and will probably be delivering a handful of NASA payloads and scientific devices that may endeavor to raised perceive the lunar setting. Peregrine may also be delivering round 15 non-NASA payloads, together with a rover from Carnegie Mellon College and a robotic mission known as Coleman from the Mexican Area Company.