The countdown to launch has begun, with United Launch Alliance's (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket being delivered to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Station ahead of launch early Monday morning. Vulcan's primary payload is Astrobotic's "Peregrine" lunar lander. If all goes according to plan, the "Peregrine Falcon" will begin a journey to the moon that will last about 1.5 months, and then land on the lunar surface on February 23. The two companies originally planned to launch on Christmas Eve, but due to ground system issues, ULA decided to postpone the launch.
"If you've been paying attention to the lunar landing industry, you know that landing on the lunar surface is incredibly difficult," Astrobotic CEO John Thornton said in a press release last month. "Despite this, our team has shown incredible creativity by exceeding expectations during flight reviews, spacecraft testing and major hardware integration. We are ready for launch and landing."
ULA and Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic aren't the only companies with high hopes for Monday's launch. This will also be the first flight of Blue Origin's BE-4 rocket engine on the Vulcan first stage booster (after years of delays), and the first mission of NASA's program to launch a payload to the lunar surface.
The program, called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to stimulate private development of lunar landers. In 2019, Astrobotic received $79.5 million in funding from NASA for the mission.
The mission is scheduled to lift off at 2:18 a.m. ET on Monday. NASA will livestream the mission on its YouTube channel.
The launch will be the first of many lunar missions this year. Other lunar probes scheduled to launch in 2024 include Intuitive Machinery's IM-1 lander, scheduled to launch aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 in February; Japan's ispace's second lunar mission (their first lander crashed into the lunar surface shortly before landing); and Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander, which is due to launch in the third quarter of 2024. (Both the Intuitive Machines and Firefly missions are part of the CLPS program).
With such a lineup, 2024 is very likely to be the year when a private company sends a spacecraft to the moon for the first time, and the first time a U.S. entity lands on the lunar surface since 1972.
Astrobotic will attempt to land the Peregrine near an area on the moon known as the Gruy Tucson Dome, where it will carry a number of NASA payloads and scientific instruments to better understand the lunar environment. In addition, Peregrine will carry about 15 non-NASA payloads, including a rover from Carnegie Mellon University and a robotics project called Coleman from the Mexican Space Agency.