United Launch Alliance, Astrobotic prepared for early Monday liftoff to the moon

The countdown to launch is on. United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket has been rolled to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral House Pressure Station forward of its early Monday morning launch, a mission that might finish with the primary absolutely non-public spacecraft touchdown on the moon.

Vulcan’s major payload is Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander. If all goes to plan, Peregrine will embark on a journey to the moon over the span of round 1.5 months, earlier than making an attempt to land on the floor on February 23. The 2 firms had been focusing on a Christmas Eve launch, however ULA determined to postpone attributable to floor system points.

That’s how we roll. #ToryTimelapse #VulcanRocket pic.twitter.com/3bz9LgMZ0r

— Tory Bruno (@torybruno) January 5, 2024

“If you’ve been following the lunar industry, you understand landing on the Moon’s surface is incredibly difficult,” Astrobotic CEO John Thornton mentioned in a press launch final month. “With that said, our team has continuously surpassed expectations and demonstrated incredible ingenuity during flight reviews, spacecraft testing, and major hardware integrations. We are ready for launch, and for landing.”

ULA and Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic should not the one companies with a lot using on Monday’s launch. This will even be the primary time Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engines take flight on Vulcan’s first-stage booster (after years of delays), and the primary mission as a part of NASA’s program to kickstart payload supply to the lunar floor.

That program, Business Lunar Payload Companies (CLPS), has collectively doled out a whole bunch of tens of millions to spur non-public improvement of moon landers. For this mission, Astrobotic was awarded $79.5 million from NASA in 2019.

The mission is slated to take off at 2:18 a.m. ET Monday. NASA will livestream the mission on its YouTube channel.

The launch would be the first of many heading to the moon this 12 months. Different lunar launches slated for 2024 embrace Intuitive Machines IM-1 lander, which is scheduled for liftoff on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in February; Japanese agency ispace’s second lunar mission (their first lander crashed into the lunar floor shortly earlier than landing); and Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander within the third quarter of 2024. (Each Intuitive Machines’ and Firefly’s missions are a part of the CLPS program.)

With such a lineup, it’s extremely doubtless that 2024 would be the 12 months {that a} non-public firm lands a spacecraft on the moon for the primary time, and the primary time an American entity has gone to the lunar floor since 1972.

Astrobotic will try and land Peregrine close to a area of the moon referred to as the Gruithuisen Domes, and it will likely be delivering a handful of NASA payloads and scientific devices that may endeavor to raised perceive the lunar setting. Peregrine will even be delivering round 15 non-NASA payloads, together with a rover from Carnegie Mellon College and a robotic mission known as Coleman from the Mexican House Company.