Mini-Throughput: The Moon Is Further Away This Week

This week has seen two significant blows dealt to our exploration of the Moon. Part the first was the failure of the planned Peregrine lander:

The first NASA-financed commercial mission to send a robotic spacecraft to the surface of the moon will most likely not be able to make it there.

The lunar lander, named Peregrine and built by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, encountered problems shortly after it lifted off early Monday morning from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The launch of the rocket, a brand-new design named Vulcan, was flawless, successfully sending Peregrine on its journey.

But a failure in the lander’s propulsion system depleted its propellant and most likely ended the mission’s original lunar ambitions.

Astrobiotic has been posting updates to their Twitter feed. The hypothesis right now is a stuck valve led to the rupture of a propellant tank. As a result, they will not be able to make a soft landing on the moon. They have decided to activate all their instruments now to collect what data they can while the spacecraft is still operational. This will salvage some of what the mission had hoped to achieve but still fall shy of the ambitious program.

So does this show that private industry isn’t ready to go the moon? Well that brings us to our second update.

Officials at the space agency announced on Tuesday that Artemis II, the first American mission to send astronauts close to the moon in more than 50 years, will not take place late this year, as had been scheduled.

They set a target date of September 2025 for the mission, which will swing around the moon without landing there.

The delay in Artemis II also pushes back the subsequent mission, Artemis III, which is to land two astronauts on the moon near its south pole. That will now occur no earlier than September 2026.

…

Amit Kshatriya, the deputy associate administrator in charge of the Moon to Mars program at NASA, said the discovery of problems with the valves in the Orion capsule’s life support system was the main cause for the Artemis II delay.

Valves that were destined for the Orion capsule for Artemis III failed in tests. “That gave us pause to stop and look at that circuit in a more detailed way,” Mr. Kshatriya said.

The valve components for Artemis II had passed tests and had been installed, but “it became very clear to us that it was unacceptable to accept that hardware, and we need to replace it in order to guarantee the safety of the crew,” Mr. Kshatriya said.

He said NASA also discovered a potential deficiency in Orion’s batteries if the spacecraft needed to separate quickly from the rocket in case of an emergency.

A lot of space watchers have expressed frustration with this delay and I share that frustration. At this point in its cycle, the Apollo program was launching every six months. We’re now going to go two years between launches of Artemis. Of course, 1960’s NASA had twice the budget in inflation adjusted terms than 2020’s NASA (and ten times more as a percentage of GDP). And they were running a lot fewer programs back then. So it’s not a completely fair comparison.

On the other hand, the Space Launch System has been in development for 11 years, during which multiple private companies have developed new rockets. Space-X has gone from testing light Falcon rockets to testing heavy lifters in the same time period and may have its next test launch a month from now. The Orion capsule has been in development since 2006, long enough to have a driver’s license. The entire point of Artemis was that it was building on remnants of Constellation and would therefore be able to hit its late 2024 target date.

These two stories illustrate the dilemma of space travel. The Peregrine failure demonstrates the importance of getting it right. But the Artemis pushback demonstrates the problems that NASA has had for some time. They are still capable of spectacular things — the Mars landers and JWST have been outstanding successes. But delays and cost overruns erode the public’s confidence in the agency and its programs.

If they keep going like this, I fear the Artemis program will be cancelled before anyone touches lunar soil. And that day that no living human will have walked on the moon will edge ever closer.