Headquartered in Pittsburgh Astrobotic United Launch Alliance's (ULA) first lunar lander will lift off on United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan Centaur rocket on Christmas Eve, ULA CEO Tory Bruno said.
Bruno told the audience at CNBC's Technology Executive Council Summit that the rocket company is aiming between December 24 and 26 to conduct the first Vulcan launch. "The reason it's Christmas Eve is because of science: orbital mechanics," he added.
The rocket will carry Astrobotic's Peregrine robotic lander and a hosted payload from Celestis, a company that partners with launch companies to send small portions of crematorium remains into space as a memorial service. ULA, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has a backup window in January in case the rocket does not lift off in December.
Astrobotic's Peregrine launches as part of a $79,5 million NASA contract awarded in 2019 under the Commercial Lunar Cargo Services initiative. The lander, which measures just over six feet tall and eight feet wide, with a payload capacity of 120 kilograms, will deliver scientific payloads to the northern part of the moon on behalf of the space agency.
While the mission date seems festive, it is partly due to Astrobotic's mission requirements, Bruno said. "We're going to a part of the moon where they need very carefully controlled lighting conditions and they also have to stay in radio communication with the Deep Space Network," he explained. "When we put the two together, we only have a few days a month."
The mission is a long time coming: Astrobotic first announced that it had chosen ULA to launch the lander in 2019; At the time, the two companies said the launch would take place in 2021.
But numerous technical delays at Vulcan, including an incident in March in which an upper stage exploded during testing at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, have pushed the timeline back. The flight was further delayed when another explosion occurred during testing of the BE-4 engines, which are being developed by Blue Origin. Even before December, ULA still has work to do: Bruno told CNBC that the company is currently qualifying Vulcan's upper stage, work that should be complete in November.
This first mission, called Certification-1, is one of two certification flights ULA will need to conduct to meet Space Force requirements.
The mission will take off from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. ULA hopes to quickly increase Vulcan's launch cadence, with the company aiming for a launch every two weeks by mid-2025. Some of that demand will come from the government, but ULA is also seeing demand from commercial customers: ULA won a huge contract for Amazon in 2022 to launch a portion of its massive Kuiper satellite Internet megaconstellation, although the price of the launch contract has increased has not been disclosed.
