Chances are, the first NASA-funded commercial mission to send a robotic spacecraft to the Moon’s surface won’t be able to get there.
The lunar lander, called Peregrine and built by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, encountered problems shortly after lifting off early Monday from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The launch of the rocket, a new design called Vulcan, was perfect and successfully sent Peregrine off. on his journey.
But a failure in the lander’s propulsion system exhausted its propellant and most likely ended the mission’s original lunar ambitions.
“The team is working to try to stabilize the loss, but given the situation, we have prioritized maximizing the science and data we can capture.” astrobotic said in a sentence. “We are currently evaluating what alternative mission profiles may be feasible at this time.”
The failure raises questions about NASA’s strategy of relying on private companies, mostly small startups, to bring scientific experiments to the lunar surface. Those scientific studies are part of the space agency’s preparations before sending astronauts back to the moon under its Artemis program.
“Every success and setback is an opportunity to learn and grow,” Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement.
Peregrine was the first of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, missions to lift off. Since CLPS was announced in 2018, NASA officials have said they are willing to take greater risks in exchange for lower costs and that they expect some of the missions to fail.
Thomas Zurbuchen, then associate administrator for science at NASA, made an analogy with hockey: each CLPS mission is like a shot on goal, and if costs are lower, there will be more shots on goal even if not all shots score. .
This contrasts with the lunar program of the 1960s, before which NASA built a series of its own robotic lunar landers. But that approach is expensive, and this time NASA wanted to encourage private industry to come up with its own solutions that would be cheaper and could create a new market for universities, companies and space agencies from other nations that want to send payloads to Earth. . moon.
For the Peregrine mission, NASA was the primary customer, paying $108 million to Astrobotic to transport five experiments. The mission also carried a variety of other payloads, including a small rover built by students at Carnegie Mellon University, experiments for the German and Mexican space agencies, and souvenirs.
Still, getting to the Moon on a low budget has proven more difficult than many thought.
The Peregrine spacecraft launched Monday at 2:18 a.m. Eastern Time. Fifty minutes later, it was successfully sent into a highly elliptical Earth orbit. All of their systems powered on successfully. To allow time to diagnose any problems, Astrobotic designed the trajectory so that the spacecraft would make one and a half trips around the Earth before entering orbit around the Moon about two and a half weeks after launch.
However, a few hours after the launch, Astrobotic reported on the social networking service that the spacecraft was having trouble keeping its solar panels pointed at the sun to generate power, pointing to a likely malfunction in the propulsion system.
An improvised maneuver managed to reorient the solar panels towards the sun, allowing the battery to charge. However, the loss of propellant meant that the goal of the moon landing could not be achieved.
Astrobotic was the third private entity to attempt to send a spacecraft to the surface of the moon, and it is very likely the third to fail.
In 2019, Beresheet, a spacecraft built by the Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL, crashed when its engine inadvertently shut down while the spacecraft was still high above the surface.
Last year, a lander sent by private Japanese company Ispace miscalculated its altitude due to a software problem and then plummeted to its destruction after running out of fuel.
Astrobotic, SpaceIL and Ispace emerged from teams that had sought to win the $20 million grand prize in the Google Lunar X Prize contest for the first private company to reach the surface of the moon. The competition, announced with great fanfare in 2007, came to a quiet end in 2018 without any of the teams even reaching space.
Astrobotic and Ispace set about finding investors who believed that sending experiments and other payloads to the Moon could become a profitable business, while SpaceIL received continued funding from Morris Kahn, an Israeli telecommunications entrepreneur, and other backers to finish Beresheet and pitch it.
The next CLPS mission, from Intuitive Machines of Houston, could launch in mid-February and head toward a region near the moon’s south pole.
Astrobotic has a contract for a second mission, using a larger lander called Griffin, to take NASA’s VIPER robotic rover to explore a shadowed crater at the lunar south pole. With the failure of Peregrine, NASA may now reconsider that mission.
Government space agencies have also experienced mixed results. An Indian lander crashed in 2019, but the attempt was repeated last year. Luna-25, the first Russian spacecraft to head to the Moon since the 1970s, crashed last year.
The only country with an unblemished lunar record this century is China, which has managed to land three robotic spacecraft on the Moon since 2013. It is expected to launch a fourth, to the far side of the Moon, later this year. JAXA, the Japanese government’s space agency, also plans to land a small experimental lunar rover on the surface on January 20.
Peregrine’s failure puts aside, for now, a protest by Navajo Nation leaders.
Celestis, a company that commemorates people by sending some of their ashes or DNA into space, and another that provides similar services, Elysium Space, had payloads on the Astrobotic spacecraft. In a letter to NASA and the U.S. Department of Transportation, Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, asked that the launch be delayed because many Native Americans consider the Moon sacred.
“The act of depositing human remains and other materials on the Moon, which could be perceived as discards elsewhere, amounts to the desecration of this sacred space,” Nygren wrote.
