The countdown to launch is on. United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket has been rolled to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station forward of its early Monday morning launch, a mission that might finish with the primary totally non-public spacecraft touchdown on the moon.
Vulcan’s major 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 trying to land on the floor on February 23. The two corporations had been focusing on a Christmas Eve launch, however ULA determined to postpone on account of floor system points.
That’s how we roll. #ToryTimelapse #VulcanRocket pic.twitter.com/3bz9LgMZ0r
— Tory Bruno (@torybruno) January 5, 2024
“If you’ve been following the lunar industry, you understand landing on the Moon’s surface is incredibly difficult,” Astrobotic CEO John Thornton mentioned in a press launch final month. “With that said, our team has continuously surpassed expectations and demonstrated incredible ingenuity during flight reviews, spacecraft testing, and major hardware integrations. We are ready for launch, and for landing.”
ULA and Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic will not be the one companies with a lot using on Monday’s launch. This may even 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, Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), has collectively doled out a whole bunch of thousands and thousands to spur non-public growth 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 a.m. 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. Other lunar launches slated for 2024 embody 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. (Both Intuitive Machines’ and Firefly’s missions are a part of the CLPS program.)
With such a lineup, it’s extremely possible 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 and land Peregrine close to a area of the moon often called the Gruithuisen Domes, and it is going to be delivering a handful of NASA payloads and scientific devices that may endeavor to higher perceive the lunar surroundings. Peregrine may even be delivering round 15 non-NASA payloads, together with a rover from Carnegie Mellon University and a robotic venture known as Coleman from the Mexican Space Agency.