US launches its first moon-bound lander since the Apollo 17 mission

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) successfully launched its new Vulcan Centaur rocket from Cape Canaveral on Monday at 2:18AM ET, carrying a US-made moon lander with NASA science and research payloads onboard. The Peregrine lander is built by Pittsburgh-based private space tech startup Astrobotic and marks a US return to the moon for the first time in over 50 years.

The uncrewed Peregrine Mission One launch is the first of a series of missions to fly under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) scheme, an initiative that enables the agency to pay private companies to carry its 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. The water experiments in particular are important for NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to eventually establish long-term human presence on the Moon.

The launch serves as the inaugural flight of the Vulcan Centaur heavy-lift booster rocket built by the ULA (a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin), which is set to replace the company’s older Altas V and Delta IV rocket designs. Its cargo, the Peregrine Mission One lander, also marks the first US spacecraft bound for the moon’s surface since the Apollo 17 launch in 1972, and will be the first private mission to have ever touched down on the moon’s surface if it successfully lands as expected on February 23rd.

That is, if another private venture doesn’t arrive first. 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.

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.