An American company’s spacecraft malfunctions on its way to the moon

The first NASA-funded commercial mission to send a robotic spacecraft to the moon’s surface will most likely not be able to get there.

The lunar lander, named Peregrine and built by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology, encountered problems shortly after taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, early Monday morning. The launch of the rocket, a brand new design called Vulcan, went smoothly and successfully sent Peregrine on its journey.

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

“The team is working to stabilize the loss, but given the situation we have prioritized maximizing the science and data we can capture,” Astrobot said in a statement. “We are currently assessing which alternative mission profiles may be feasible at this time.”

The failure raises questions about NASA’s strategy of relying on private companies, mostly small startups, to get science experiments to the moon’s surface. These scientific studies are part of the space agency’s preparations before sending astronauts back to the moon under the Artemis program.

Peregrine was the first of the missions under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program to take off. Since CLPS was announced in 2018, NASA officials have said they are willing to take greater risks in exchange for lower costs and expect some missions to fail.

That contrasts with the Apollo program of the 1960s, in which NASA built a series of its own robotic lunar landers. But that approach is expensive, and this time NASA wanted to encourage private industry to come up with its own solutions that would be cheaper and could create a new market for universities, companies and other countries’ space agencies looking to send payloads to Earth. Moon.