Editor's note: Months after this article was first published, Astrobotic's Peregrine Mission 1 quietly slipped to 2022, likely due to its carrier Vulcan Centaur rocket from United Launch Alliance not being ready to launch by the end of 2021. Peregrine is still expected to be one of the first commercial landers on the Moon, and this is still a great story. Read on.
It's not sleek and curvy like a SpaceX Starship. It's got no billionaire backer with deep pockets and spare cars to shoot into deep space. It's not even guaranteed headlines on all of the space blogs. But in 2021, a small delivery Moon lander called Peregrine from Pittsburgh may just become the most important thing to settle on the lunar surface since Apollo's Eagle.
Designed like your friendly neighborhood mail truck, boxy and easy to unload, Peregrine's ultimate goal is to be so reliable you almost forget it's actually shuttling some of humanity's most precious packages 240,000 miles across the unforgiving vacuum of deep space.
"Hopefully, in 10 years, lunar delivery is a regular, normal thing, and it would be a mark of success if it's not front page news," said John Thornton, Chief Executive Officer of space robotics company Astrobotic Technology on a recent Zoom call with Outerspaceland. By then, the spotlight should be on its extraordinary payloads, not on the delivery vehicle itself. "We want the news to be about the new ground-breaking exploration and the science and the development and the next steps of... how we will settle the stars."
Astrobotic Technology's Peregrine lander is one of a handful of Google Lunar X Prize alums still vying to be the first commercial machine to safely land on the Moon. Nobody won the $20 million Lunar X Prize, which was allowed to expire in 2018, but the contest did its job in kick-starting interest in commercial Moon missions.
Some of the teams formed to win the Lunar X Prize kept pursuing their dreams despite the prize fizzling away. In fact, the Beresheet lander, operated by SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, came close to a lunar landing in April 2019, but Beresheet crashed in the Sea of Serenity (Mare Serenitatis) after its main engine failed at a critical time during landing.
Like Team Israel, Astrobotic pushed forward after X Prize and is now the frontrunner for the first commercial lunar landing. Peregrine will aim for the frozen lava of the Moon's Lake of Death (Lacus Mortis) in late 2021. Peregrine should at least be part of what could be a photo finish for first place with rival Nova-C from Intuitive Machines, which hopes to land on the other end of the Moon's near side in the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum) at about the same time.
Even though the Lunar X Prize expired, NASA saw potential in the commercial sector and stepped in as a big customer to help fund commercial Moon landers like Peregrine. Both Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines secured millions of dollars in contracts through NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program to deliver payloads to the Moon ahead of NASA's Artemis human landers. Nova-C is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in October 2021. Thornton said Peregrine Mission One is scheduled to launch on the brand new United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan Centaur sometime in the second half of 2021, but he didn't have a more definite date.
There's a specific window of time in the roughly 28-day lunar cycle Peregrine has to land at Lacus Mortis to give it the best chance to land on the Moon safely and complete its mission successfully. In fact, depending on the launch date, Peregrine may have to "loiter" in lunar orbit for up to a month to hit the proper landing window, Thornton said.
Because of that and the very real possibility of launch delays, it's entirely possible that both Peregrine and Nova-C launch at about the same time and meet each other for a good old fashioned stare-down in lunar orbit while their teams back on Earth anxiously await their optimal landing times. How tempting would it be to press the "go" button from Astrobotic mission control to get Peregrine down to the surface first even if it were way ahead of schedule? As exciting as that would be, Thornton's team would resist any temptation to rush.
"Obviously, it'd be great to be the first, but again, success is more important than [being] the first. And it's one of those things that if any of us succeed it's good for the industry. It's good for CLPS as a whole. It's good for commercial space. It's good for opening up the skies making sure that there's going to be continuing opportunities for missions to fly to the Moon," Thornton said.
A successful landing of either or both of these rival machines as scheduled next year would signal the official start of commerce on the Moon and open the floodgates to more privately run missions.
"So, we really, really are rooting for each other on this one, because the market is so early and just getting going," Thornton said.
The fact that it is even possible for two different Moon landers from two different private space companies to be scheduled to launch within mere days of each other on two different commercial rockets shows just how far the commercial space sector has already come in a very short amount of time. The opening of commercial activity on the Moon would be yet another huge leap forward. But there won't be time to dwell on all that.
Besides Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, at least three more small space companies currently plan to launch Moon landers by the end of 2022, according to their websites. Masten Space Systems, Firefly Aerospace and iSpace are all planning Moon missions. A Blue Origin-led Human Landing System might even touch down on the Moon as soon as 2024 on an Artemis mission that could be carrying people. Astrobotic, itself, already has two additional missions planned through 2023, including one for its larger Griffin lander, assigned to deliver the VIPER moon rover for NASA two years after Peregrine Mission One.
According to Thornton, Peregrine Mission One has the most payloads planned for any lander so far with at least 24. It will carry at least 12 payloads for NASA as part of the CLPS program and at least 12 for other customers.
Among those customers are six representing nations that have never operated on the Moon. The United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Hungary will all have payloads on the Peregrine lander, according to the Peregrine manifest. They would join space powers Russia, China and the U.S. as official Moon explorers.
It will triple the the number of nations that have ever operated payloads on the surface of the Moon, Thornton said. He couldn't say yet which new nation would have the honor of coming off Peregrine first. "I think that'll be a conversation that'll be hot and heavy for a little while... Everybody wants to be the first."
Like "spiders dropping from a leaf", little robotic rovers will descend from Peregrine one by one and go off and do their own thing, guided by mission controls all over the world, Thornton said.
It's a good analogy, considering Asagumo, a futuristic walking rover from Spacebit out of the U.K., could be confused for the four-legged robotic spider from your post-apocalyptic sci-fi nightmares. Fortunately, it's actually harmless and fits in the palm of your hand and only wants to explore lunar lava tubes and other hard-to-reach places on the Moon to make way for future human settlements.
These first commercial rovers could also be described as tourists coming off of a tour bus, excitedly snapping photos and selfies as they wander off in different directions.
The robot rovers on board the Peregrine lander will employ a kind of robot "buddy system" to take selfies of each other, said Spacebit Chief Business Development Officer Chuck Lauer during a recent YouTube virtual conference with Worldwide Engineering. They have cameras but none of them have arms.
Asagumo just has its four spider legs. Its Japanese buddy, the little Yaoki rover from Dymon, only has its two wheels. The buddy system is a small example of the spirit of cooperation that runs all the way through these first critical commercial Moon missions commissioned by NASA.
"Cooperating with other commercial companies within this commercial ecosystem that NASA has developed under the CLPS program is the fundamental enabler that makes all of this happen," Lauer said during the Worldwide Engineering virtual conference.
Thornton echoed that sentiment in his Zoom call with Outerspaceland. "Yeah it's like a friendly coopetition, kind of thing, right?... We need to succeed for our nation and the market. And that's critical for all of us. So, I think the competition probably comes later, after it's an established service," he said. "... But right now, it's all of us against the elements and just the challenging environment in space."
A good way to ensure Moon services become well established is to make it as easy as possible for all kinds of people, companies and countries to land and operate on the Moon. That goes to the heart of the suite of services Astrobotic is already putting together. Making space "accessible to the world" is the company's stated mission.
In addition to getting its customers to the surface of the Moon, landers like Peregrine will provide essential power and communications for many of its payloads, especially for the scientific instruments designed to stay attached to the lander.
For those payloads that need to get away from the lander but don't have their own wheels or legs, Astrobotic developed the CubeRover system as part of its "planetary mobility service". CubeRover is a concept based on the highly successful CubeSat model, which standardized satellite sizes and made it much easier to stack them in rockets and send them into orbit. Astrobotic hopes to do a similar thing with mobility on the Moon, where, as long as a payload fits in one of its 2U, 4U or 6U CubeRovers, it can, in theory, be delivered anywhere on the Moon all the way to the "last meter". One U represents a 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm, 1 kg payload, according to Astrobotic's website.
Finally, for the average person who just wants to send a small memento to the Moon on one of these historic missions, Astrobotic partnered with Earth delivery giant, DHL, to offer the MoonBox. DHL delivers your personal MoonBox from your house to Astrobotic. Astrobotic takes it the last 238,855 miles to the Moon.
The price for MoonBox makes it a bit of a luxury. $460 pays for about enough space on the Peregrine lander to ship an SD card or a lock of hair. But that price reflects the limited amount of space on the lander and just how economically daunting space travel still is. Besides, for those willing to spend the money, size doesn't matter. It's the sentiment that counts.
MoonBox will send all kinds of "little mementos that are touch-points for people," Thornton said in a
2019 interview on the TMRO YouTube channel. "And I think it's kind of fun, that if you can send something up to the Moon, your story will forever be intertwined with what we all see in the night sky."
The sentiment is nice. It does seem fun. But some may ask, Why waste time on the Moon when Mars is within reach for human exploration in our lifetimes? Even though these Moon missions could pave the way for humans on the Moon later this decade, haven't we already planted our flag there with Apollo? Surely, it's past time to move on to greater things.
We still need to learn how to "live off the land" in space, and the Moon is the best testing ground for that since it's so close to Earth, Thornton said. Once we master resource extraction on the Moon, we can more confidently venture out into the rest of the Solar System and plan on being there for a while, he said.
"We need to learn to extract resources in space. We haven't done that before. We need to learn to 3D print parts from local terrain... Imagine going to the Moon and being able to replace a part just by digging up some Moon dirt and printing something on your printer rather than getting it sent back from home," Thornton said. "Reducing the reliance on Earth materials, that's really the key. And if we can do that, then we really open up our Solar System and become true explorers."
And it's not just dirt on the Moon. Many of the rovers making their way to the Moon in the years after Peregrine Mission One will head to the poles where there might be massive stores of water-ice. It makes the Moon extremely exciting for space prospectors. Thornton said Astrobotic will be keeping close tabs on all of that activity.
In outer space, water is like oil, Thornton said. "It'll be the fuel, the power needed to refuel spacecraft in lunar orbit and go beyond."
But Astrobotic won't be one of the prospectors, at least not right away. The business plan is to sell tools and logistical support, Thornton said. Sort of like selling pickaxes and pans to 49ers during the California gold rush.
"So, Astrobotic, as a company, we're all about space robotics. And we want to develop and grow that delivery service... And then, as the resource game kicks on, there's going to be a huge demand for robotics, because a lot of that will have to be done robotically. And I think that's where we can play and continue to play for decades to come," Thornton said.
Astrobotic's robotic landers and rovers could certainly someday find their way to the surface of Mars too, but the Red Planet isn't close to being ready for commercial activity just yet, Thornton said. "There's a lot of science and exploration firsts that have yet to be done. And I really think the big way to open up Mars is to learn on the Moon."
In the coming weeks back here on Earth, Astrobotic will open up its brand new
47,000 square foot headquarters in Pittsburgh, PA. One short year later, mission control there will be the center of the space-loving universe as an Astrobotic controller prepares to press the "go" button that starts the landing sequence for what could be mankind's first commercial landing on the Moon.
After that, Peregrine will be on its own, relying on structure, software, sensors and propulsion that had been in development for more than a decade to land safely on the Moon.
There is simply not enough time to send up new instructions if something goes wrong. The spacecraft has to be robust enough to adapt on its own during landing, Thornton said.
One heart-pumping half-hour later the world will know if Peregrine touched down safely. After years of preparation and weeks on pins and needles, Thornton can finally exhale.
But, it's the night before the launch in Florida that is really top of mind for Thornton. That's when he'll gather with customers, colleagues, and friends and family to toast the 13 years of hard work it took just to get Peregrine on the launchpad.
"Regardless of what would happen next, there's some measure of success just to get to that point right there." Thornton said. "And then of course the day of the launch, that's just going to be a totally nerve-racking, edge-of-seat, nail-biting kind of experience... Every step is going to be another nail-biter, another holding-your-breath moment. It's gonna be exciting."
Adam created Outerspaceland to tell the stories of dreamers and to live through all of the brilliant people who push the boundaries of everything that's possible. Contact him at outerspacelander@gmail.com or @Ospaceland on Twitter.