The launch occurred on Monday at 10:18 Moscow time, lifting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket carried Astrobotic Technology’s Peregrine lunar lander, a centerpiece of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which aligns with the Artemis initiative to land astronauts on the Moon by 2025-26. The core aim of CLPS is to dramatically lower the cost of delivering small payloads to the Moon by purchasing turnkey missions as a service from private contractors.
Peregrine rests on a flexible platform that can be reconfigured for other missions with similar payloads. The vehicle spans 2.5 meters in width and 1.9 meters in height, making it smaller than Luna-25, and it can deliver up to 265 kilograms to the lunar surface.
If the flight proceeds as planned, on February 24 the lander will touch down alongside five Colmena microlunar rovers from Mexico, each about 12 centimeters in diameter, and the Iris lunar rover developed by American students. Iris is slightly larger than Colmena, roughly the size of a shoebox, and carries a capable camera for studying geological samples. The landing platform includes a suite of spectrometers to analyze the lunar soil and other instruments, but the emphasis is on validating that a private company can execute a lunar mission affordably in practice.
Peregrine marks the first American spacecraft sent to the lunar surface in more than five decades. The last human steps were Apollo 17 in 1972, and the last American robotic mission was Surveyor 7 in 1968.
Additionally, the Peregrine launch signifies the debut of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket.
American-style import substitution
Vulcan serves as a direct successor to the Russian Atlas V engine rocket, which had a long, dependable run. It powered missions ranging from Pluto’s New Horizons to the Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance, the Jupiter probe Juno, and the lunar satellite LRO. In 2014, amid political tensions with Russia, the United States moved to sever reliance on the Russian engine and accelerate Vulcan’s development, which required creating an engine with comparable or superior performance.
The BE-4 engine for Vulcan was developed by Blue Origin, with initial tests conducted in 2017. It operates in a closed cycle with an oxygen-rich mixture and uses methane rather than kerosene. BE-4 delivers less thrust than the old design in one unit but is smaller in diameter and mass, allowing two BE-4 units on the Vulcan first stage. The upper stage uses a modified Centaur hydrogen-oxygen unit.
Vulcan’s payload to low Earth orbit exceeds 27 tonnes, surpassing Atlas V and Falcon 9. This is significant because SpaceX and ULA compete heavily for Defense Department launches in the United States.
The BE-4 is also slated for use in Blue Origin’s New Glenn, a reusable heavy-lift rocket project targeted to begin its first flight in the latter half of 2024. If these plans succeed, SpaceX would gain a direct competitor in the reusable heavy-lift segment.
How did the RD-180 reach the United States?
The idea of integrating Russian engines into American missiles began in the 1990s. Buyers in the West often favored lower prices, acknowledging that Russian labor could be cheaper than Western labor. Yet the RD-180 proved to be a high-quality, valuable product with no true American analog at the time.
A turbopump requires energy to drive the main combustion chamber. Early space engines used an open-cycle approach, burning a small amount of oxygen and kerosene in an auxiliary chamber to spin the turbine, which then pumped fuel into the main chamber. To prevent turbine melting, excess kerosene cooled the flame, and exhaust often contained unburned kerosene, which reduced thrust.
A straightforward fix emerged: burn the unburned fuel in the main chamber, but incomplete combustion risks soot that can foul the engine. An alternative was to burn kerosene with excess oxygen, creating a hot, oxygen-rich mixture that could oxidize engine parts. In the 1970s, American engineers solved the problem by replacing kerosene with hydrogen, avoiding soot formation. This led to the RS-25 engines used on the Shuttle in a closed-cycle, fuel-rich arrangement. The Soviets pursued a different path, developing robust alloys to withstand hot, oxygen-rich mixtures, as seen in NK-33 engines for the N-1 project and in RD-170 engines for Energia-Buran.
Later, hydrogen’s drawbacks—such as its tendency to permeate tiny cracks, low density, and extremely low liquefaction temperature—were acknowledged. The RS-25 proved intricate and costly, making scaled-down versions for lighter missiles impractical. Conversely, the RD-170 was scalable, with its four-chamber design halved to create the RD-180 while retaining high thrust in a compact form. This adaptation contributed to the success of the first-stage engines for American Atlas-III and Atlas-V rockets, shaping American spaceflight for years.
In 1996, the RD-180 project won the bid to power the first stages of the Atlas-III and Atlas-V, becoming a pivotal element of United States space efforts for a long time.