United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, was set to launch its powerful Vulcan rocket from Florida for the first time on Monday, as part of a mission that includes the first US attempt to land on the moon in over half a century. On board Vulcan, a 60-meter-tall rocket equipped with engines made by Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ company, is the Peregrine lunar lander built by the space robotics company Astrobotic. The launch is scheduled for 2:18 a.m. EST (0718 GMT) Monday in Cape Canaveral, Florida. If all goes well, Peregrine would mark the US’s first soft landing on the moon since the last Apollo landing in 1972, and the first lunar landing ever by a private company—an achievement that has proven challenging in recent years.
Peregrine is expected to touch down on the moon on February 23, carrying scientific payloads that will seek to gather data on the lunar surface ahead of future planned human missions. This launch is a crucial first for United Launch Alliance (ULA). Vulcan, which reached its launch pad on Friday, has been in development for about a decade to replace ULA’s Atlas V rocket and compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 on the satellite launch market.
“This is where the fun begins,’ declared ULA’s Tory Bruno on social media. ULA was born in 2006 from a merger of Boeing and Lockheed rocket programs. The aerospace giants jointly own the company, although they have been looking to sell it for about a year. The stakes of the Vulcan mission are heightened. The US Space Force, one of Vulcan’s main customers, sees this launch as the first of two necessary verification flights before being able to carry national security payloads.
“This is really, really, really important to ULA’s future success,” said George Sowers, ULA’s former chief scientist and one of the architects of the Vulcan program, regarding the mission. “They’re all good if this goes well. But certainly it’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t.”
ULA’s two operational rockets, Atlas V and the giant Delta IV Heavy, are expected to be phased out in the coming years, leaving Vulcan as the sole successor to continue the company’s perfect mission success rate. The new rocket already has a multibillion-dollar order book for some 80 missions. The retirement of the Atlas V was decided upon when its Russian-made RD-180 engines—part of a partnership established in the aftermath of the post-Cold War détente in the 1990s—raised concerns from US lawmakers after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s Falcon 9, a reusable launcher offering cheaper flights to low Earth orbit, has eroded ULA’s monopoly on national security missions, helping pave the way for Vulcan’s development, with mission pricing starting at about $110 million. (Reporting by Joey Roulette, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
#fusée #Vulcan #sapprête #effectuer #son #premier #lancement #avec #premier #alunisseur #américain #depuis #des #décennies #janvier
publish_date] pt]