Vulcan rocket is launched on mission towards the Moon – 01/08/2024 – Science

With the launch this Monday (8) in Florida, everyone will be watching what could be the first private spacecraft to successfully land on the Moon. But, from an immediate commercial point of view, the big attraction is really the rocket.

This is the new launcher from ULA (United Launch Alliance), a joint venture between the giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin, a company that dominated the American market for launching satellites, especially military satellites, until the rise of SpaceX at the end of the 2010s. .

The debut began at 4:18 am (Brasília time), when the rocket left the base at Cape Canaveral.

With the Vulcan, an immediate replacement for the prestigious Atlas 5 and Delta 4, operated by the same company, ULA hopes to once again share the market with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The rocket already has a contract for around 70 launches in the coming years.

Like the Atlas and Delta, the two-stage vehicle can be equipped with up to six solid fuel auxiliary thrusters to increase space transport capacity.

The big news is the first stage engines, model BE-4, powered by liquid methane and oxygen. Developed by Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, they are a 100% American product – a ULA response to the growing animosity between the USA and Russia. Its immediate predecessor, the Atlas 5, used RD-180 engines manufactured by Russian company NPO Energomash, which consumed kerosene and liquid oxygen. With the change, the Americans now have two companies with large, completely national launchers qualified for defense missions.

It remains to be seen whether the Vulcan can perform satisfactorily – which will begin to be tested with this first launch – and whether it can compete on cost with its immediate competitor, the prodigious (and partially reusable) Falcon 9, from SpaceX.

Tory Bruno, CEO of ULA, keeps the price of a launch with the new Vulcan secret, but a contract already signed with the Pentagon gives a clue: 11 launches closed for US$ 1.3 billion (which amounts to US$ 118 million per flight). In a similar agreement, the Department of Defense contracted ten launches with SpaceX for US$1.23 billion ($123 million per flight). At least at the start, it’s a good fight. But for how long?

It’s a reasonable bet that SpaceX has room to lower its prices in the face of emerging competition, which may not be true for ULA. For now, the Vulcan is an old-fashioned rocket – completely disposable. The company has plans to recover and reuse the first stage engines, ejecting them from the rocket and recovering them at sea. But an implementation of the plan is still far away.

In any case, the US welcomes the new launcher, which ensures independent access to space even if the competitor has a problem that forces it to interrupt flights. And a great way to promote it is with a flashy inaugural mission, with a trip to the Moon.

THE PILGRIM

Taking a ride on a rocket on its maiden flight seems like a somewhat risky idea. But risk is the keyword for the private lunar missions that will come, starting with PM1 (Peregrine Mission 1).

The landing module developed by the Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic was one of the first to sign a contract with NASA to transport payloads to the Moon. The US civil space agency’s plan is to foster a lunar market, with companies providing transport for multiple customers, of which NASA would be just one.

In effect, PM1 is carrying 21 payloads, of which only six are from NASA. Among the agency’s devices are sensors to detect the presence of water, carbon dioxide and methane in the soil, as well as characterize the dynamics of these volatile compounds during a lunar day. A radiation sensor will also be on board, as will a laser retroreflector array, used to measure the distance from spacecraft (or even Earth) to the lunar surface.

Several countries are also on board. The Mexican Space Agency is leading the Colmena project, which consists of five 60-gram minirobots that will explore the lunar soil. If it works, Mexico will become the first country in Latin America to have scientific equipment on the Moon.

Companies from Seychelles and the USA will promote initiatives linked to the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, and Astroscale, from Japan, will send a capsule with messages from 80,000 children collected around the world.

Carnegie Mellon University, in the USA, in turn, embarked a small jeep, the Iris Lunar Rover, and two American companies are offering lunar funeral services – sending portions of customers’ ashes in celebration of their lives. Elysium Space will leave the samples on the Moon next to the Peregrine landing module. Celestis – a pioneering company in missions of this type, which launched the first human ashes into space in 1997 on a Pegasus rocket – will have two memorial missions: one on the small Peregrine, going to the Moon, and another on the second stage of Vulcan, which will remain in deep space in an orbit around the Sun.

Several artistic projects are on board, such as Carnegie Mellon University’s MoonArk and Lunar Mission One’s digital art gallery, both in the United States. Data repositories that can survive for a long time on the Moon are also among PM1’s payloads.

Once launched into space, it remains to be seen whether it will be able to land smoothly. The two previous private attempts, with the Israeli group SpaceIL, in 2019, and with the Japanese company ispace, in 2023, failed. If all goes well, Astrobotic’s Peregrine could become the first successful private mission to the lunar surface on February 23. That’s if the launch of Houston-based Intuitive Machines, currently scheduled for mid-February, on a more direct trajectory, doesn’t arrive first.

In both cases, NASA has payloads on board. For both of them, she knows there are no guarantees of success. But the bet is that the insistence and learning from each mission will end up generating an era of intense commercial exploration of the Moon, taking science and space research along for the ride.