A first American spacecraft will land on the Moon very soon. The moon landing is planned for next month on a specific date…
After half a century of absence, the United States is preparing to mark its return to the Moon, this time with the idea of ??establishing a lasting base there. But the Artemis program, which aims to send astronauts to our satellite again, has fallen behind schedule. The first key stage of the project, Artemis I, which consisted of putting an unmanned spacecraft (Orion) into a lunar orbit, before returning to Earth, took place at the end of 2022 without major problems. Artemis II, which this time was to take three American astronauts and a Canadian around the Moon, without yet setting foot on it, on the other hand, is having more difficulty taking off. The mission did not take place in 2023 as planned and NASA announced the postponement of this second test flight to 2025, which should delay the return of humans to the surface of the Moon.
However, the first big jump, with a moon landing this time, will take place next month and will be carried out by a private company! This ambitious project is in fact led by Astrobotic, an American company which could become the first in the private sector to successfully land on lunar soil. Its spacecraft, called Peregrine, will be launched without a crew. It will carry NASA instruments to study the lunar environment, another essential step in preparing for the Artemis program’s manned missions.
The launch of Peregrine is scheduled for December 24, from Florida, aboard the new Vulcan Centaur launcher, from the ULA industrial group. The journey to lunar orbit will take just a few days, but a delay has been decided to give the spacecraft optimal lighting conditions before touching the lunar body. The date of the moon landing is therefore set for January 25.
Astrobotic CEO John Thornton recently clarified during a press conference that the descent will be done autonomously, without human intervention, but will be monitored from the company’s control center. He also stressed that one of the great challenges of this mission was to succeed in landing on the Moon while crushing costs, while only half of missions of this type have been successful. To date, only four countries have succeeded in landing on the Moon: the USSR and the United States in the 1960s, then China and, very recently, India.
To resist these competitors, NASA has signed contracts with several companies, such as Astrobotic, but also Firefly Aerospace, Draper and Intuitive Machines, the latter of which is due to take off in January aboard a SpaceX rocket. NASA’s initiative to entrust American companies with the transport of scientific equipment to the Moon, known as CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services), aims to encourage the private sector to invest in the conquest of space and to ‘offer transport services at lower cost.
Chris Culbert, the CLPS program manager, stressed that NASA is aware of the risks and accepts that some of these missions could fail. However, he says that CLPS has already had an impact on the infrastructure necessary for the American return to the Moon, which should therefore take place within the next few years.
