United Launch Alliance is launching their first Vulcan Centaur rocket. It will carry the Astrobotics Peregrine lunar lander.
UPDATE – Launch seems good. Nextbigfuture has another article covering the launch.
Vulcan’s first stage is powered by BE-4 engines from Blue Origin, which also will be used on Blue Origin´s New Glenn Rocket. The engines run on methane and liquid oxygen. The second stage is a Centaur V engine, powered by two RL-10 engines.
Peregrine is an Astrobotics lunar lander, delivering 16 customers to the moon’s surface and several NASA payloads. The total mass of the payload is 1,283 kg. As a secondary payload, the mission also flies the Celestis Enterprise Flight. It contains more than 150 flight capsules with cremated remains, DNA samples, and messages of greetings from clients worldwide, that will be sent on a journey into space.
A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan VC2S rocket launch is the first certification mission from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The Cert-1 flight test includes two payloads. The first is the Peregrine Lunar Lander, Peregrine Mission One (PM1) for Astrobotic as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative to deliver science and technology to the lunar surface. The second payload is the Celestis Memorial Spaceflights deep space Voyager mission known as the Enterprise Flight.
Launch Window target: January 8th at 2:18AM EST (07:18 UTC)
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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The cremated remains thing is really tacky. All you with high hopes for extraterrestrial colonization…. lol.