Missions of the U.S. Lunar Payload Services to the Moon and the Post-Apollon Apollo 11 Program with the Artemis Program
Astrobotic Technology’s lander caught a ride on a brand new rocket, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan. The Vulcan streaked through the Florida sky before dawn and is going on a roundabout route to the moon for an attempted landing on February 23.
The first mission under the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services scheme, is the uncrewed Peregrine Mission One launch, which will be flown by companies to carry scientific equipment into space. Astrobotic was paid $108 million — just a fraction of the $25.8 billion that NASA spent on the trailblazing Apollo program — to carry the five NASA payloads to the moon which will be used to detect water ice and measure radiation levels. NASA wants to establish long-term human presence on the Moon by using water experiments.
In December 1972, the United States launched a moon-landing mission. The era of NASA’s highest achievement, the 11 and 12 men who walked on the moon, was ended by Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt.
The space agency’s new Artemis program — named after the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology — looks to return astronauts to the moon’s surface within the next few years. First will be a lunar fly-around with four astronauts, possibly before the end of the year.
The Moonshot of Monday: Landing of the Vulcan Rocket from Cape Canaveral, the Nova-C, and a Navajo Nation
Highlighting Monday’s moonshot was the long-delayed initial test flight of the Vulcan rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The 202-foot (61-meter) rocket is essentially an upgraded version of ULA’s hugely successful workhorse Atlas V, which is being phased out along with the company’s Delta IV. Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, provided the Vulcan’s two main engines.
The Soviet Union and the U.S. racked up a string of successful moon landings in the 1960s and 70s, before putting touchdowns on pause. China joined the elite club in 2013 and India in 2023. Last year saw a private Japanese company crash into the moon, as well as landers from Russia. An Israeli nonprofit crashed in 2019.
Next month, a landers will be lifted by Musk’s company. The Nova-C lander’s more direct one-week route could see both spacecraft attempting to land within days or even hours of one another.
The Navajo Nation recently sought to have the launch delayed because of the human remains. It would be a “major insult” to the Native Americans who have revered the body for thousands of years. Thornton said the December objections came too late but promised to try to find “a good path forward” with the Navajo for future missions.
One of the spaceflight memorial companies that bought room on the lander, Celestis, said in a statement that no single culture or religion owns the moon and should not be able to veto a mission. More remains are on the rocket’s upper stage, which, once free of the lander, will indefinitely circle the sun as far out as Mars.
The Peregrine mini-rover project, launched on February 22nd, is going to be a big milestone for the company Intuitive Machines
Cargo fares for Peregrine ranged from a little over a hundred dollars to about one million dollars per kilogram, not nearly enough to break even. Thornton says that this first flight has nothing to do with that.
Other payloads aboard the Peregrine lander include less scientific cargo, such as artwork, a physical Bitcoin token loaded with one BTC of the actual cryptocurrency, and a Japanese time capsule containing 185,872 messages from children around the world. Following the lander’s successful separation from Centaur’s upper stage, the rocket will now carry the DNA and cremated human remains of several notable celebrities — including Star Trek legends Gene and Majel Roddenberry, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, and James Doohan — for a space burial aboard Celestis’ personal flight capsules.
If another private venture does not arrive first, that is. The Houston-based company Intuitive Machines is expected to use a SpaceX Falcon 9 to launch its uncrewed IM-1 mission from Cape Canaveral with the aim to land on February 22nd — a day before of the ULA mission, sparking something of a private space race.
For those who have worked for years on payloads flying aboard Peregrine, today’s launch is a major milestone. “After so many years of extremely heavy work, it is in a sense the culmination of a childhood dream,” says Gustavo Medina Tanco, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, who leads the mini-rover project. And yet, he adds, “space is a risky business, and there are many things that can go wrong at any one of innumerable parts, components and stages”.
Delays were a part of the programme, with the first launch pushed back by two years. One of the companies originally awarded a launch slot went bankrupt, cancelling its mission. And landers have had to be reconfigured to accommodate changes as designs evolve. For instance, Astrobotic discovered that it needed more leeway in how much mass it put aboard Peregrine, so five NASA payloads that had been planned for Peregrine got booted to later CLPS missions.
The agency is planning to send astronauts to the lunar south pole in the coming years to search for resources such as water ice. It says that some of the missions can test the technology needed for the exploration, such as the ice-drilling rover set to launch in November.
The next CLPS mission to take flight after Astrobotic’s will be one from Intuitive Machines in Houston, Texas, which aims to launch in mid-February and land in the Malapert A crater near the lunar south pole. It is possible for the Intuitive Machines lander to land on the surface by February 22nd since it is travelling in a different direction than Peregrine. NASA has instruments on the landers that study how exhaust from the rocket interacts with the surface during landing.
John Thornton, chief executive officer of Astrobotic, says that the company aims to make space accessible to people around the world. “We are really trying to do the right thing, and I hope we can find a good path forward with [the] Navajo Nation,” he says.
Peregrine also carries non-scientific payloads, including art and educational projects, for paying customers. The most controversial are cremated human remains destined for the lunar surface, provided by two companies that aim to memorialize people in space. The Navajo Nation has lodged a complaint against putting the ashes on the Moon, describing it as desecration of a celestial object that is sacred to the Navajo people. NASA apologized to the Navajo Nation after landing the ashes of planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker on the Moon in 1999. The agency has a meeting planned with Navajo leaders, as well as with the US Department of Transportation, to discuss next steps.
The five NASA instruments on board, paid for in a US$108-million contract, include three that will hunt for volatile elements, such as water. One of the things that a mass spectrometer can do is measure the composition of volatile substances in soil and atmosphere as well as lunar dust kicked up by mini rovers. The observations will take about two minutes and give a detailed view of how volatile composition changes over time. Another instrument will count neutrons to measure how much water is present in the lunar soil. All three instruments aim to analyse how volatile molecules move around on the lunar surface — including how they are transported to the Moon’s poles, where they are frozen in dark craters. In particular, the water in the craters could serve as a potential resource for future astronauts.
The Bay of Stickiness is referred to as Sinus Viscositatis for the rock domes that seem to have formed from lava. If the 2-metre-tall spacecraft lands successfully, it will start conducting science with a variety of instruments from NASA and others. A set of tiny rovers from Mexico, and a German detector that will measure the radiation on the lunar surface are two of the non- NASA payloads that are planned for the moon.
Today’s launch is just the first step in the difficult process of landing on the Moon. The spaceship, which was built by the company Astrobotic in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, has to enter lunar orbit and then touch down safely. The landing attempt is planned for 23 February.
CLPS: launching a lunar payload service for the Commercial Lunar Programme at the Johnson Space Center (Johnson Space Center) in Houston, Texas
NASA is aiming for an average of two CLPS flights each year, but as many as six could happen in 2024. “You’ll see progressively more complex science as the commercial community demonstrates what they are capable of,” says Chris Culbert, programme manager for CLPS at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
The launch is the first of at least ten planned through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme, in which the agency pays private companies to deliver scientific instruments to the Moon’s surface. If the programme succeeds, NASA will essentially be outsourcing future robotic lunar missions to private companies — a sort of Uber Eats delivery for Moon science.