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Journalism of Courage
Another privately-built Moon lander bites the dust. Pittsburgh-based Astrobiotic lost contact with its Peregrine moon lander at 2.20 AM on Friday, the company announced.
Astrobiotic’s Peregrine follows a long line of privately-led moon landing missions that never made it to Earth’s lone satellite, including Japan’s Hakuto and Israel’s Beresheet. “While this indicates the vehicle completed its controlled re-entry over open water in the South Pacific at 4:04 p.m.EST (2.34 AM IST on Friday), we await independent confirmation from government entities,” said a statement from the company.
The Peregrine spacecraft launched on January 8 on the first flight of the United Launch Alliance’s Centaur rocket. The launch vehicle completed its task but the Peregrine lander suffered from a major fuel leak after it was deployed. Astrobiotic attributed the leak to a stuck valve that caused the rupture of an oxidiser tank, according to Space.com.
If the mission had gone according to plan, Peregrine would have become the first American mission to soft-land on the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. After the issue surfaced, Astrobiotic changed the mission’s direction and decided to operate the spacecraft more like a satellite. They tested the scientific instruments onboard and other systems as Peregrine flew thousands of kilometres. In the end, Astrobiotic decided to intentionally burn it up in the Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds.
NASA signed a deal with Astrobiotic for the mission and gave the private space company over $108 million to help with development efforts and fly the payloads, according to CNN. That is an approximately 36 per cent increase over the contract value. This was because the deal was renegotiated during the pandemic because of supply chain-related problems.
But NASA has other options in its corner, having partnerships with three other companies that are developing robotic lunar missions. Houston-based Intuitive Machines plans to launch its IM-1 mission in mid-February. The missions are all part of the space agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which is set up in such a way that the company can continue to own the vehicles while NASA acts like one of the many customers launching a payload.
