ULA's Vulcan Launches Private Moon Lander Peregrine, Human Remains, To Space

The United Launch Alliance's (ULA) Vulcan Centaur lifted off at 0718 UTC,(Jan.8) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, carrying Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic's Peregrine moon lander. The ULA space vehicle on its first-ever flight in this Cert-1(Certification-1) mission, was blasted skyward by its two solid rocket boosters (SRBs) and two Blue Origin-built BE-4 first-stage engines with nearly 2 million pounds of thrust.

The SRBs successfully separated from Vulcan's first-stage booster about two minutes after liftoff, as the 62 meters-long rocket continued to climb through Earth's atmosphere. About five minutes after liftoff, the first stage shut its engines down and separated from the Centaur upper stage, which began the first of three burns after a 15-second coast phase. Centaur's first burn lasted about 30 seconds, followed by a longer, four-minute translunar injection burn a half-hour later.

About 50.5 minutes after launch, the rocket's primary payload, Peregrine, was released to journey onward toward the moon.

"Yeehaw! I am so thrilled, I can't tell you how much," ULA president and CEO Tory Bruno said just after Peregrine deployed successfully. "So far, this has been an absolutely beautiful mission back to the moon."

After its separation from Centaur, Peregrine's first step was to establish communications and orient itself toward the sun. Ahead in its journey to the moon.

However the lunar lander suffered a serious anomaly in its propulsion system today, shortly after being deployed into space by Vulcan Centaur. This may hinder Peregrine journey to the moon.

"Unfortunately, it appears the failure within the propulsion system is causing a critical loss of propellant," Astrobotic wrote in an update on X. "The team is working to try and stabilize this loss, but given the situation, we have prioritized maximizing the science and data we can capture. We are currently assessing what alternative mission profiles may be feasible at this time."

Had Peregrine landed successfully next month as planned, it would become the first American spacecraft to reach the moon's surface since Apollo 17 in 1972. Peregrine could have also been the first private mission ever to touch down on the lunar surface. Unfortunately Astrobotic may not be able to make the historic landing.

Peregrine's 20 payloads could have enabled six nations to send material to the moon for the first time — Mexico, Germany, the United Kingdom, Hungary, the Seychelles and Nepal.

At a press conference on Jan. 5, Astrobotic CEO John Thornton highlighted an especially symbolic payload included on the Peregrine lander. "There's a piece of Everest going back to the moon," he said. "There was actually an astronaut that brought a piece of the moon to the peak of Everest," he explained, referring to a 2010 expedition by NASA astronaut Scott Parazynski, who brought moon rocks collected by the  Apollo 11 crew to the top of the world's highest peak. Everest now gets to return the favor, Thornton said.

Among Peregrine's payloads is one from space memorial company Celestis, which sends customer DNA and cremated remains into space. The company offers a tiered mission structure, which ranges from suborbital flights to missions to Earth orbit, lunar orbit and the lunar surface to a permanent orbit around the sun. Celestis has sent payloads to the lunar surface once before and is doing so again on Peregrine, with a mission the company calls Luna Tranquility.

Tranquility includes the DNA of 66 mission "participants," whose remains will be permanently situated on the moon's surface following Peregrine's landing. Though the plans and payloads for Celestis' Tranquility flight were publicly announced years before the mission finally made it to the launch pad, objections about depositing human remains on the moon surfaced less than a month ago. 

In a Dec. 21 letter to NASA and the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), President of the Navajo Nation Buu Nygren had requested that the memorial launch be postponed, saying that "the act of depositing human remains and other materials, which could be perceived as discards in any other location, on the moon is tantamount to desecration of this sacred space."

However in prelaunch briefings and interviews leading up to the Cert-1 launch, NASA officials including Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA's Science Mission Directorate, stressed the nature of commercial contracts, and the agency's inability to assert that type of authority over a private company's actions. "This isn't NASA's mission," Kearns told Space.com.

Kearns also pointed out that NASA makes the effort to consider a wide variety of implications when planning its missions, citing as an example a conference in the spring of 2023. 

"In April this past year, we hosted at NASA Headquarters a workshop to get input from a variety of people on what we ended up calling, in shorthand, 'ethics of Artemis,'" he said. "And it was the idea to get non-traditional groups that probably don't deal with the scientific or engineering aspects of our future projected work on the moon and Mars to give us their inputs on things that they think that we or the U.S. government-wide should consider in the future."

Celestis CEO Charles Chafer said he wishes the concerns had been raised well before the rocket and payload had reached a logistical point of no return. "We also strongly disagree with the characterization of our reverent, carefully prepared by aerospace and funeral service professionals, flight capsules that are permanently encased in the lunar lander and not released onto the lunar surface as desecration," Chafer said in a statement. "Our clients consider our service an appropriate celebration — the polar opposite of desecration."

Tranquility isn't the only Celestis mission flying on the Cert-1 launch. The company also put a payload called Enterprise on the rocket's Centaur upper stage. That mission, aptly named, has been decades in the making. It includes DNA from "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry and his wife, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, as well as the remains from several actors from the original TV series, including Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan and DeForest Kelley, who played Lieutenant Uhura, Chief Engineer "Scotty" and CMO Leonard "Bones" McCoy, respectively. 

The DNA from some of these folks' living relatives is also flying on Celestis' Enterprise flight, including Rod Roddenberry, the son of Gene and Majel, and Wende Doohan, the widow of James.

"I feel like this is our last adventure together," Wende Doohan said in an interview during a Celestis event honoring the mission participants. James Doohan died in 2005, and  Wende thinks he would love this tribute. "If he had had a chance to fly while he was still alive, he would have adored it. It was the best thing that he could think of to do," Doohan said. "Had he been alive when Bill went up into space, he would have fought him for the seat, I'll tell you."

"Bill" is William Shatner, who played Capt. Kirk on "Star Trek." Shatner launched on a suborbital flight aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket in October 2021.

"I truthfully see all this as an incredibly beautiful, symbolic kind of thing," Rod Roddenberry told Space.com. This isn't the first Celestis flight to include the "Star Trek" creator's ashes, but it is the first with Gene and Majel together.

"My mother made [Charles Chafer] promise that when she passed away, that he would take her ashes and my father's ashes, and not just send them up into orbit, but launch them out into space," Rod said. "We are at the event that is celebrating not just my mother and father, but many other notables in 'Star Trek,' as well as many other people who have signed up for this and shared their families remains, as well as their DNA to be launched into space. Everyone is going where no one has gone before."

The "Star Trek" notables aren't the only ones aboard the Enterprise flight, which is headed to an orbit around the sun aboard Centaur. The mission includes material from 270 participants, including DNA from former U.S. presidents George Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.

NASA's five scientific payloads aboard Peregrine are contracted through the space agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, with Peregrine providing the program's first service fulfillment.

"It's a totally new way of doing business," Kearns said, "and [the Peregrine mission] is going to be our first data of how it's gonna go."

Today's Peregrine failure after deployment by Vulcan will be seen as a temporary setback.

NASA's CLPS contracts have implications for the agency's Artemis program, which aims to land astronauts on the moon for the first ime in 2025 or 2026 and set up a base on the lunar surface not long afterward. That base will be located in the moon's southern polar region, where water ice appears to be plentiful.

"We have many, many scientific questions about the moon, about all different areas of the moon, but particularly the South Pole," Kearns said. "We'd like to get better prepared to better plan the astronaut visits that will go to the South Pole, and eventually the Artemis base camp will be put there. And we really want to try to generate a lunar ecosystem of companies that are very skilled and successful about turning a service to bring things to the moon."

"We went to each of these companies we've contracted with, and we said, 'We want you to bring our stuff to the moon, operate it and get us our data back.' And it's up to them to design a mission, design a lander, make a lander, buy a launch vehicle, buy all the communications, have a mission control," he added. "They are really a delivery service for us. And that's a really new way of doing things. And we really think there's a lot of benefits to the United States, a lot of advantages of going down that route."

Programs like CLPS are freeing NASA to focus on more cutting-edge research and development, according to Kearns. "We would really like to be in the position that, for things industry could do, we would like to just go to industry and buy that as a service," he said. "And that lets us focus on more state-of-the-art things which are not clear to industry how to do, so that NASA could go pioneer those."

As its mission name suggests, this is Vulcan's first certification flight. The rocket will need to launch a second time in order to obtain the clearances the rocket needs. 

"We've been working with the U.S. Space Force for multiple years on the certification of Vulcan, and it goes really much further beyond just the two certification flights," Mark Peller, vice president of major development at ULA, said during a pre-launch press briefing. "Obviously, these are very significant, but the U.S. Space Force has partnered with us throughout development and has full insight into design and development." 

The development of Vulcan was a lengthy process, lasting about a decade. Its debut was originally targeted for 2019, but issues with the launch vehicle and its BE-4 engines delayed the launch multiple times. Despite these problems, ULA representatives voiced confidence in the rocket in the days leading up to liftoff. 

"We're building on more than 120 years of combined Atlas and Delta experience," Gary Wentz, ULA's vice president of government and commercial programs, said during the Jan. 5 teleconference, referring to the company's venerable Atlas V and Delta rockets. 

"As we brought Vulcan onboard and designed the systems, we leveraged the existing systems as much as possible from Atlas and Delta," Wentz added. "When you look, the only hardware that hasn't flown prior to this flight is the BE-4 engines; all the others, or variants thereto, have flown on either Atlas or Delta flights on missions for other customers."

ULA has an ambitious timeline for the new rocket in 2024.

"We have six Vulcans on the manifest this year," Wentz said on the Jan. 5 call, "and just like with Atlas and Delta, it's dependent upon the contracts, and whether or not the spacecraft are ready to support those launches. So we anticipate some movements in the manifest, but right now, as a baseline, there's six Vulcan contractually on the manifest."

According to Wentz, if data from Vulcan's first launch comes back nominal, "we would be prepped and ready to proceed right now." He said April is the earliest likely opportunity for Vulcan to fly Cert-2, which will launch the first mission of Sierra Space's Dream Chaser cargo space plane to the International Space Station. That schedule, Wentz added, "would be worked in concert with the NASA team and space station availability.

WATCH ULA's Vulcan Centaur first ever flight.