Update: Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander fell back to Earth 10 days after launch due to a propellant leak that ruled out a moon landing.
United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket lifted off for the first time tonight, making use of booster engines built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture to launch what could be the first mission to put a commercially built lander safely on the moon.
At the end of a seemingly trouble-free countdown, the rocket rose from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:18 a.m. ET Monday (11:18 p.m. PT Sunday). It was the first-ever launch for the Vulcan rocket, and the first-ever use of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines.
Two BE-4 engines, fueled by liquefied natural gas, powered the first-stage booster spaceward with an assist from two side boosters. “We’re seeing excellent performance out of the BE-4’s,” ULA flight commentator Rob Gannon said.
About five minutes after liftoff, Vulcan’s Centaur V upper stage separated from the first-stage booster and carried Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander into orbit. Spacecraft separation took place 50 minutes after launch, sending Peregrine on the next leg of its trek to the moon.
“Yee-haw! I am so thrilled,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said after separation. Soon after Bruno’s joyful whoop, Astrobotic confirmed contact with the lander.
“Big kudos and congrats to the whole team!” Bezos said in an Instagram post.
Peregrine lander’s peregrinations
Peregrine is programmed to go on a roughly 45-day journey that traces looping orbits around Earth and the moon. If all goes according to plan, the 8-foot-wide lander will touch down Feb. 23 at Sinus Viscositatis, an area near a geologically intriguing set of lava hills known as the Gruithuisen Domes.
NASA is paying Astrobotic $108 million to fly a suite of science instruments that will take stock of the radiation environment and the chemical composition around the landing site — perhaps including on-the-ground detection of water in lunar soil.
This is the first of a series of commercial moon landing missions supported by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS, to prepare the way for NASA’s crewed Artemis missions to the lunar surface.
“It is a game-changing program for us,” said Sandra Connelly, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for science. “It really is leveraging industry in new ways.”
Astrobotic CEO John Thornton said tonight’s launch marked the “beginning of the dawn of a new era for the surface of the moon and how we think about space.”
“This is an opportunity for commercial payloads to fly to the surface of the moon on a regular, routine basis,” he said. “That means our nation’s scientists, the world’s scientists, can access the moon in ways never before possible.”
If Peregrine touches down successfully, it would mark the first soft lunar landing by a U.S.-built spacecraft since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
Success isn’t assured, however. Back in 2019, the Israeli-built Beresheet lander was primed to become the first commercial lander on the moon, but that mission ended in a crash landing. Since then, China and India have successfully put robotic landers on the lunar surface, while Japanese and Russian attempts fell short. (Another Japanese moon probe is due to attempt a landing later this month.)
NASA’s science mission is expected to run through the 14-day stretch of sunlight at the landing site, but the solar-powered lander is likely to run out of power during the 14-day lunar night.
In addition to the NASA-funded instruments, Peregrine is carrying a wide assortment of commercial payloads — including mementos and plaques, a mini-rover, micro-robots from Mexico, miniaturized data archives that blend digital and DNA records, and sets of memorial capsules containing cremated remains. (Ashes and DNA samples will also be flown into deep space aboard Vulcan’s Centaur V upper stage.)
Crucial test for Vulcan and its engines
A successful launch was arguably as critical for United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin as the mission to the moon will be for Astrobotic and NASA.
It’s been nearly a decade since Bezos and Bruno announced that their companies were working together on a new type of rocket engine that would power a new type of rocket.
At the time, ULA and Blue Origin said they were targeting 2019 for the first flight of the Vulcan rocket with BE-4 engines — but the debut was delayed by a series of technical challenges. Eventually, Vulcan rockets will be built so that the engines can be recovered from the booster and reused, but that won’t be the case for the early launches.
Each BE-4 engine provides 550,000 pounds of thrust at liftoff — which is more than twice the thrust of SpaceX’s methane-fueled Merlin engines. The BE-4 engines were designed at Blue Origin’s HQ in Kent, Wash., and tested at the company’s facility in West Texas. Blue Origin built a $200 million factory for scaled-up production of the engines in Huntsville, Ala. — not far from where ULA builds its Vulcan rockets.
The Centaur V upper stage used a different brand of rocket engine: Aerojet Rocketdyne’s RL10, which is made in Florida. The upper stage was also equipped with 12 MR-107 attitude-control thrusters that were built at Aerojet’s facility in Redmond, Wash.
United Launch Alliance is depending on the Vulcan Centaur rocket to fill the gap that will be left by the impending retirement of its Atlas V rocket. This is the first of two certification launches that Vulcan has to complete before it can be considered for national security space missions, which is why ULA refers to the launch as Cert-1.
Meanwhile, Blue Origin is depending on the BE-4 to power not only ULA’s Vulcan rockets, but also its own orbital-class New Glenn rocket. New Glenn’s first flight is currently scheduled for later this year.
Vulcan’s success is likely to boost confidence that ULA and Blue Origin will be able to follow through on their launch schedules — which feature the first launch of Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser cargo shuttle on Vulcan, and a pair of robotic Mars probes on New Glenn.
Amazon will no doubt breathe easier as well. The company has reserved 38 Vulcan launches with ULA and 12 New Glenn launches with Blue Origin to put thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit for its Project Kuiper broadband network. None of those launches can lift off without the BE-4.
