At 2:18 a.m. ET Monday, a private company hopes to launch an unmanned mission from Cape Canaveral to land a probe on the Moon on February 23rd, the first new American mission to “soft land” a probe on the Moon in a half-century. And it will launch a new era of NASA-endorsed private missions paving the way for the next step in the Artemis mission to return humans to the Moon, the Washington Post reports (via gift link).
Monday’s launch of Astrobotic’s probe with the help of two BE-4 engines made by (comparatively benign) billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin oddly, won’t make its cargo the first commercial probe on the Moon’s surface; a launch in the works planned for February and using evil billionaire Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket will hurtle its Intuitive Machines mission to the Moon with an expected landing date of February 22nd.
Astrobotic’s Peregrine spacecraft will take an unusually direct route to the Moon, allowing the craft to orbit the Moon and take measurements as it waits for its intended landing spot to spin into the sunlight. The Intuitive Machines craft will take a similarly direct path, but it’ll just be a dick, cut in line, and land first.