A brand new rocket, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur, should lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 2:18 am (7:18 GMT) for its maiden voyage, carrying Astrobotic’s Peregrine Lunar Lander. Weather so far appears favorable.

If all goes to plan, Peregrine will touch down on a mid-latitude region of the Moon called Sinus Viscositatis, or Bay of Stickiness, on February 23.

“Leading America back to the surface of the Moon for the first time since Apollo is a momentous honor,” Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s CEO John Thornton said ahead of the launch.

Until now, a soft landing on Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor has only been accomplished by a handful of national space agencies: the Soviet Union was first, in 1966, followed by the United States, which is still the only country to put people on the Moon.

China has successfully landed three times over the past decade, while India was the most recent to achieve the feat on its second attempt, last year.

Now, the United States is turning to the commercial sector in an effort to stimulate a broader lunar economy and ship its own hardware at a fraction of the cost, under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

– A challenging task –

The space agency has paid Astrobotic more than $100 million for the task, while another contracted company, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, is looking to launch in February and land near the south pole.

“We think that it’s going to allow… more cost effective and more rapidly accomplished trips to the lunar surface to prepare for Artemis,” said NASA’s Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration.

Artemis is the NASA-led program to return astronauts to the Moon later this decade, in preparation for future missions to Mars.

Controlled touchdown on the Moon is a challenging undertaking, with roughly half of all attempts ending in failure. Absent an atmosphere that would allow the use of parachutes, a spacecraft must navigate through treacherous terrain using only its thrusters to slow descent.

Private missions by Israel and Japan, as well as a recent attempt by the Russian space agency have all ended in failure — though the Japanese Space Agency is targeting mid-January for the touchdown of its SLIM lander launched last September.

Making matters more fraught is the fact it is the first launch for ULA’s Vulcan, although the company boasts it has a 100 percent success rate in its more than 150 prior launches.

ULA’s new rocket is planned to have reusable first stage booster engines, which the company, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, expects will help it achieve cost savings.

– Science instruments, human remains –

On board Peregrine are a suite of scientific instruments that will probe radiation and surface composition, helping to pave the way for the return of astronauts.

But it also contains more colorful cargo, including a shoebox-sized rover built by Carnegie Mellon University, a physical Bitcoin, and, somewhat controversially, cremated remains and DNA, including those of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, legendary sci-fi author and scientist Arthur C. Clarke, and a dog.

The Navajo Nation, America’s largest Indigenous tribe, has said sending these to the Moon desecrates a body that is sacred to their culture and have pleaded for the cargo’s removal. Though they were granted a last ditch meeting with White House, NASA and other officials, their objections have been ignored.

The Vulcan rocket’s upper stage, which will circle the Sun after it deploys the lander, is meanwhile carrying more late cast members of Star Trek, as well as hair samples of presidents George Washington, Dwight D Eisenhower and John F Kennedy.

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SpaceX argued that the structure of the regulatory board is unconstitutional and the hearing process violates the company’s right to a jury trial, according to a copy of the complaint filed in a federal court in Texas.

The filing did not refute the notion that former workers whose complaints are at issue in the case were fired for asking colleagues to sign a letter critical of Musk’s social media behavior.

“The Open Letter demanded that SpaceX take certain actions addressing perceived shortcomings” and linked to a survey, the filing contended.

A small group of SpaceX employees used the company’s internal communication platform to send the open letter to thousands of colleagues in June of 2022, according to the complaint.

In the letter, SpaceX employees called on leadership at the company to address what they considered disparaging and inappropriate comments by Musk on what was then Twitter, since renamed X, according to US media.

Employees who were subsequently fired complained to the NLRB, accusing SpaceX of violating labor law.

Eight complaints deemed to have merit were consolidated by the NLRB this week. An administrative hearing is set for March 5.

SpaceX called on a federal court in Texas to stop the hearing from taking place and declare that the NLRB structure violates the Constitution.

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The Navajo Nation, America’s largest Indigenous tribe, has raised concerns over the presence of human cremated remains on the lander vehicle, calling the mission a “desecration” of the Moon which holds a sacred place in their culture. 

On January 8, Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander is set to hitch a ride on a giant United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket making its maiden voyage under a NASA commercial partnership aimed at saving the US space agency money.

Peregrine’s scientific instruments will probe for lunar surface radiation, helping NASA better prepare for crewed missions going there later this decade under the Artemis program.

But the boxy robot’s manifest also includes payloads from two companies — Elysium Space and Celestis — that will contain cremated remains and DNA to stay on the Moon, inside the lander, forever.

While Elysium hasn’t offered details, Celestis has 69 individual “participants” including late Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, and a dog named Indica-Noodle Fabiano.

Customers paid prices starting at $12,995, according to the company’s website.

In a December 21 letter addressed to officials at NASA and the Department of Transportation, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren expressed what he called “our deep concern and profound disappointment regarding a matter of utmost importance,” and called for NASA to delay the launch.

“The Moon holds a sacred position in many Indigenous cultures, including ours,” Nygren wrote. 

“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.”

– NASA promises meeting –

Nygren added the situation was reminiscent of the Lunar Prospector mission launched in 1998 by NASA, which intentionally crashed a probe into the Moon’s surface. On board were the remains of renowned geologist Eugene Shoemaker.

Then, too, the Navajo voiced objections. NASA apologized and committed to consult with Native Americans in future, according to a contemporary report in The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Washington.

NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration Joel Kearns said Thursday an intergovernmental team had arranged a meeting with the Navajo Nation, but added the agency had no control over its private partner’s payloads.

“We take concerns expressed from the Navajo Nation very, very, seriously, and we think we’re going to be continuing on this conversation,” Kearns told reporters.

Celestis was less conciliatory.

“We respect all cultures’ right to engage in religious practices, but no single culture or religion should exercise a veto on space missions based on religious tenets,” the company said.

Denying that the mission “desecrates the Moon,” it stressed the material would remain aboard the lander rather than being deposited on the surface.

Kearns said NASA’s growing private partnerships could lead to “changes to how we view this” or to establishing industry standards.

It won’t be the first human DNA left on the barren celestial body — that distinction belongs to the almost 100 bags of feces and urine left behind by American astronauts during the 1969-1972 Apollo lunar landings.

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The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) is nicknamed the “Moon Sniper” because it is designed to land within 100 metres (328 feet) of a specific target on the lunar surface.

If successful, the touchdown would make Japan only the fifth country to have successfully landed a probe on the Moon, after the United States, Russia, China and India.

On Monday, SLIM “successfully entered the moon’s orbit at 04:51 pm Japan time” (0751 GMT), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said in a statement released Monday evening.

“Its trajectory shift was achieved as originally planned, and there is nothing out of the ordinary about the probe’s conditions,” the agency said.

The lander’s descent towards the moon is expected to start around 12:00 am Japan time on January 20, with its landing on the surface scheduled for 20 minutes later, JAXA said.

The H-IIA rocket lifted off in September from the southern island of Tanegashima carrying the lander, after three postponements linked to bad weather.

JAXA said this month that the mission would be an “unprecedentedly high precision landing” on the Moon.

The lander is equipped with a spherical probe that was developed with a toy company.

Slightly bigger than a tennis ball, it can change its shape to move on the lunar surface.

Compared to previous probes that landed “a few or 10-plus kilometres” away from targets, SLIM’s purported margin of error of under 100 metres suggests a level of accuracy once thought impossible, thanks to the culmination of a 20-year effort by researchers, according to JAXA.

With the advance of technology, demand is growing to pinpoint targets like craters and rocks on the lunar surface, Shinichiro Sakai, JAXA’s SLIM project manager, told reporters this month.

“Gone are the days when merely exploring ‘somewhere on the moon’ was desired,” he said.

Hopes are also high that SLIM’s exactitude will make sampling of lunar permafrost easier, bringing scientists a step closer to uncovering the mystery around water resources on the moon, Sakai added.

Japanese missions have failed twice — one public and one private.

Last year, the country unsuccessfully sent a lunar probe named Omotenashi as part of the United States’ Artemis 1 mission.

In April, Japanese startup ispace tried in vain to become the first private company to land on the Moon, losing communication with its craft after what it described as a “hard landing”.

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The 15-second meow-vie featuring an orange tabby named Taters is the first to be streamed from deep space, and demonstrates it’s possible to transmit the higher-data-rate communications needed to support complex missions such as sending humans to Mars.

The video was beamed to Earth using a laser transceiver on the Psyche probe, which is journeying to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to explore a mysterious metal-rich object. When it sent the video, the spaceship was 80 times the distance between the Earth and Moon.

The encoded near-infrared signal was received by the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, and from there sent to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.

“One of the goals is to demonstrate the ability to transmit broadband video across millions of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video data, so we usually send packets of randomly generated test data,” said Bill Klipstein, the tech demo’s project manager at JPL. 

“But to make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at JPL to create a fun video, which captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission.”

Space missions have traditionally relied on radio waves to send and receive data, but working with lasers can increase the data rate by 10 to 100 times.  

– Giant pounce for catkind –

The ultra-HD video took 101 seconds to send to Earth at the system’s maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second — faster than most home broadband connections.

“In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space,” said Ryan Rogalin, the project’s receiver electronics lead at JPL.

So why a cat video? First, there’s the historic connection, said JPL. When American interest in television began growing in the 1920s, a statue of Felix the Cat was broadcast to serve as a test image.

And while cats may claim the title as man’s best friend, few can dispute their number-one position when it comes to internet videos and meme culture.

Uploaded before launch, the clip shows Tabby, the pet of a JPL employee, chasing a laser light on a couch, with test graphics overlayed. These include Psyche’s orbital path and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate.

While laser transmission has been demonstrated in low Earth orbit and as far away as the Moon, the Psyche mission is the first time it’s been deployed in deep space. Aiming a laser beam from millions of miles away requires extremely precise “pointing,” a major technical hurdle engineering teams had to solve.

The technology demonstration even needs to compensate for the fact that in the time it takes for light to travel from the spacecraft to Earth, both the probe and the planet will have moved — so the uplink and downlink lasers need to adjust for the change accordingly.

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Here are the maiden flights space watchers can look forward to next year.

– Countdown for Ariane 6 –

The Ariane 6 rocket, which carries Europe’s hopes for space autonomy from the United States and Russia, is set to make its inaugural voyage between June 15 and July 31, after four years of delays due to the pandemic and other difficulties.

The project was launched in 2014 in response to the rise of SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Building on Ariane 5, Ariane 6 should be half as expensive as its predecessor thanks to new production methods.

With a planned 28 launches even before its first flight, the rocket, available in two versions, will carry payloads to both geostationary orbit (11.5 metric tons) and low Earth orbit (21.6 metric tons), using reignitable upper-stage engines.

Once launched, the challenge for Ariane Group will be to successfully ramp up its output. “It is a real industrial challenge to go from building two to nine launchers per year,” said executive president Martin Sion.

– End of limbo for Vega C? –

Banned from flying since December 2022 after the failure of its first commercial flight, the Vega C rocket manufactured by Italian space company Avio, is supposed to launch again in the fourth quarter, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).

The unavailability of Europe’s premier small rocket forced the ESA to rely on the US company SpaceX to launch several European scientific and GPS satellites.

The accident was caused by the failure of a rocket motor nozzle, forcing a redesign.

– Ambitious missions for Vulcan Centaur –

United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has developed the Vulcan Centaur rocket to replace its Atlas V and Delta IV launch vehicles.

After getting past the first few flights, ULA will begin recovering and reusing the first stage boosters.

This and other innovations make the Vulcan platform “much more affordable” than its predecessors, ULA CEO Tory Bruno told AFP.

Vulcan Centaur will be able to carry up to 27.2 metric tons into low Earth orbit, comparable to Falcon 9. The first launch of Vulcan Centaur is scheduled for early January. This ambitious mission will carry a private lunar lander which could become the first American spacecraft to land on the Moon since the end of the Apollo program.

A second mission, which will carry Sierra Space’s new “Dream Chaser” spacecraft, is planned for the second quarter of 2024. This mini-space shuttle will be responsible in particular for resupplying the International Space Station.

– New Starship tests –

SpaceX will continue to test its Starship mega-rocket in 2024, after the first two flights in its fully-integrated configuration ended in them blowing up. SpaceX has insisted that explosions during the early stages of rocket development are welcome and help inform design choices faster.

Starship is both the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing 397 feet (121 meters) tall.

Its development is being closely scrutinized by NASA, which has contracted a version of Starship as a lunar lander for its Artemis missions to the Moon.

In the second voyage, the two stages of the rocket successfully separated before exploding — and didn’t cause massive damage to the launchpad.

SpaceX boss Elon Musk predicted the next launch could take place in weeks, but he’s known for his optimistic forecasts, and the next flight won’t take place until there’s a greenlight from the Federal Aviation Administration.

– Big debut for New Glenn? –

Blue Origin already flies tourists to space on short hops carried out by its New Shepard suborbital rocket. But the company headed by Jeff Bezos is also working on a bigger rocket, New Glenn, which at 98 meters tall will be able to carry payloads of 45 metric tons to low Earth orbit.

That’s more than double that of Falcon 9, but still less than SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which manages 63.8 metric tons.

“We expect to fly in 2024,” a spokesperson told AFP.

One of the first flights will launch the NASA probe EscaPADE on a mission to study the magnetosphere of Mars.

New Glenn is also an essential element of the lunar landing system ordered by NASA for the Artemis 5 lunar mission.

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Since the December 14, 2013 landing, China has built a crewed space station, sent a robotic rover to Mars and become the first nation to make a controlled landing on the far side of the Moon.

President Xi Jinping has described building China into a space power as “our eternal dream”.

Here are five things to know about this space programme:

– A slow start –

Chinese leader Mao Zedong declared his nation’s space ambitions soon after the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957.

It took 13 years for China to launch its first satellite Dong Fang Hong, or “The East is Red” — named after the famous Communist revolutionary song it broadcast from orbit.

It was not until the late 1980s that the programme began to pick up pace, alongside China’s ascent into the world’s richest and most powerful nations.

Overseen by the military, its secretive space programme’s goals became more ambitious. In 1992, it formally began a project to send humans into space.

– ‘Taikonauts’ –

More than three decades after its first satellite launch, on October 15, 2003, Yang Liwei became the first Chinese to travel into space, and an instant national hero.

With the success of his Shenzhou 5 mission, China became only the third nation after the United States and Russia to demonstrate the ability to launch humans into space.

In total, 20 Chinese astronauts have made the journey into space, including two women. State media have used the term “taikonaut” to describe China’s spacefarers.

Many of them have journeyed to Tiangong, China’s first long-term space station whose construction was completed last year.

Though much smaller than the International Space Station, it contains living quarters for a rotating crew, robotic arms and airlocks for conducting spacewalks.

– To the Moon –

China has also sent exploration missions to the Moon.

Named after the Moon goddess in Chinese folklore, Chang’e-3 touched down on the surface in 2013, making China only the third nation to successfully land there.

Two other milestones followed. In 2019, China became the first nation to make a controlled landing on the far side of the Moon with Chang’e-4.

A year later, Chang’e-5 brought the first lunar samples to Earth in more than 40 years.

Chinese space authorities have said they plan to land humans on the Moon by 2030, as well as build a lunar base.

– Mars and deep space –

One of the most spectacular successes of the Chinese space programme came in 2021 when its Tianwen-1 mission landed a rover named Zhurong on the surface of Mars.

China is only the second nation after the United States to put a robotic rover on the Red Planet.

Officials have said they aim to send a crewed mission there by 2033.

Aside from landers and orbiters, China is soon expected to launch a space telescope named Xuntian.

Orbiting close to the Tiangong space station, with which it can dock, Xuntian is expected to have a field of view far greater than NASA’s Hubble telescope.

– Defence and prestige –

While China says it opposes the weaponisation of space, its policy makers have also identified space as critical to national defence and security.

Its military is a core player in the national space programme, and China is developing spy satellites, anti-satellite missiles and electronic warfare capabilities, according to the US military.

China “sees counterspace operations as a means to deter and counter a US intervention during a regional military conflict”, the Pentagon said in a report to Congress this year.

And beyond the direct applications of these technologies, China considers success in space as a major driver of its image as a global power at home and abroad.

“National prestige is perhaps one of the most important, if not the most important, motives driving Chinese space ambitions,” said R. Lincoln Hines, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States.

“These symbols of increasing international status provide a powerful form of domestic propaganda.”

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“We’re targeting a launch window that opens on Dec. 18 for our next New Shepard payload mission,” the company tweeted on X, adding the flight would contain 33 science and research payloads, as well as 33,000 postcards.

The Federal Aviation Administration in September announced it had closed its probe into last year’s crash, ordering the company to carry out 21 corrective actions before it could resume launches. 

The report said failure of an engine nozzle caused by higher-than-expected engine operating temperatures caused the New Shepard rocket to fall back to the ground shortly after liftoff, even as the capsule carrying research experiments escaped and floated safely back to Earth.

“During the mishap the onboard launch vehicle systems detected the anomaly, triggered an abort and separation of the capsule from the propulsion module as intended and shut down the engine,” said the FAA.

The fact the capsule ejected right away was viewed positively, suggesting that any crew would have been safe if they had been aboard.

In all, Blue Origin has flown six crewed flights — some passengers were paying customers and others flew as guests — since July 2021, when Bezos himself took part in the first flight.

While Blue Origin has been grounded, rival Virgin Galactic, the company founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, has pressed on, flying five commercial flights this year.

The two companies compete in the emerging space tourism sector, offering a few minutes of weightlessness in “suborbital” space.

Virgin Galactic tickets were sold for between $200,000-$450,000, while Blue Origin doesn’t disclose its ticket prices publicly.

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The rocket launcher system was initially planned to blast off in 2020, but the Covid-19 pandemic and repeated technical issues have kept it on the ground, depriving Europe of an independent way to send heavy missions into space.

ESA chief Josef Aschbacher told a press conference that the announcement of the 2024 launch date range came after the “complete success” of a dress rehearsal at Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana last week.

That test involved firing up the launcher’s Vulcain 2.1 engine and running it for more than seven minutes. 

Aschbacher said it was a “good day” for European space efforts, adding that a more precise launch date is expected to be announced in March or April 2024. 

Philippe Baptiste, the head of French space agency CNES, said that the decision about an exact date would follow a “general qualification review” of the launcher. 

The Ariane 6 still has to pass two more tests under “degraded conditions” on December 3 and 15. 

Martin Sion, CEO of the rocket’s manufacturer ArianeGroup, said these tests will verify that the launcher’s “reliability and robustness” meets expectations.

The Ariane 6 was designed to keep up with rising competition in the rocket market including from billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Its workhorse predecessor, the Ariane 5, blasted off for the last time in July after 27 years of launches. 

With the smaller Vega C grounded following a launch failure in December and Russia withdrawing its Soyuz rockets in response to sanctions over Moscow’s war in Ukraine, the ESA has been left without an independent way to launch missions until the Ariane 6 is ready.

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The lander, named Peregrine, will have no one on board. It was developed by American company Astrobotic, whose CEO John Thornton said it will carry NASA instruments to study the lunar environment in anticipation of NASA’s Artemis manned missions. 

Several years ago, NASA opted to commission US companies to send scientific experiments and technologies to the Moon — a program called CLPS.

These fixed-price contracts should make it possible to develop a lunar economy, and provide transport services at a lower cost. 

“One of the big challenges of what we’re attempting here is attempting a launch and landing on the surface Moon for a fraction of what it would otherwise cost,” said Thornton Wednesday at a press briefing at his company’s base in in Pittsburgh.

“Only about half of the missions that have gone to the surface of the Moon have been successful,” he said. 

“So it’s certainly a daunting challenge. I’m going to be terrified and thrilled all at once at every stage of this.”

Takeoff is scheduled for December 24 from Florida aboard the inaugural flight of the new rocket from the ULA industrial group, named Vulcan Centaur. 

The probe will then take “a few days” to reach lunar orbit, but will have to wait until January 25 before attempting landing, so that light conditions at the target location are right, Thornton said. 

The descent will be carried out autonomously, without human intervention, but will be monitored from the company’s control center. 

In the spring, the Japanese start-up ispace had already attempted to become the first private company to land on the Moon, but the mission ended in a crash. Israel also suffered a setback in 2019. Only four countries have successfully landed on the Moon: the United States, Russia, China and, most recently, India. 

In addition to Astrobotic, NASA has signed contracts with other companies, such as Firefly Aerospace, Draper and Intuitive Machines. 

The latter is due to take off aboard a SpaceX rocket in January. 

“NASA leadership is aware of the risks and has accepted that some of these missions might not succeed,” said Chris Culbert, the CLPS program manager. 

“But even if every landing isn’t successful, CLPS already had an impact on the commercial infrastructure needed to establish a lunar economy,” he said. 

With its Artemis program, NASA wants to establish a base on the surface of the Moon.

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