White shades rolled up Wednesday to reveal a spacecraft, just a couple of meters tall and wide, behind the windows shielding a lab containment area on Pittsburgh’s North Side.
“This is the lander that is returning our nation to the moon for the first time in nearly 50 years, [from] right here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, of all places,” said John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic, a lunar logistics company based in Pittsburgh’s Chateau neighborhood.
The company estimates that between September and December of this year the Peregrine lander will be integrated into a Vulcan Centaur rocket, made by Colorado-based United Launch Alliance, and launched into space from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., for a 45-day unmanned mission that will deliver multiple “payloads,” or units of cargo, to the moon.
The unveiling of the lunar lander was part of a two-day space conference that brought together NASA officials, engineers and experts to showcase the tri-state region as a hub for advanced technology and expertise as the U.S. prepares for a series of unmanned missions alongside private sector partners with the eventual goal of returning astronauts — this time including a woman — to the moon’s surface by the end of the decade.
“Half a century ago, Apollo 17 landed on the surface,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a former U.S. senator from Florida. “... Now we're going back to the moon with unmanned landers, landers that are commercial."
The Peregrine will be the first American spacecraft to soft land on the moon since the Apollo missions and is the first lander in NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative to unveil its flight model, according to the company.
The 24 payloads affixed atop and below lander’s decks include research instruments and cultural items from NASA, Carnegie Mellon University, private companies and the space agencies of other countries, including Mexico and Germany. Among them are several NASA measurement devices, a radiation detector from the German Aerospace Center, a lunar rover developed by CMU, a physical coin loaded with one bitcoin from Bitmex, cultural archives designed by the Arch Libraries Foundation to survive lunar conditions, and a box of small personal keepsakes sponsored by DHL Germany.
Once the lander separates from the rocket just after the late 2022 launch, the mission will be monitored from a control room within Astrobotic’s 47,000-square-foot facility.
Mr. Thornton and NASA officials were joined at Wednesday’s event by U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-Scranton, chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee, which is responsible for appropriating NASA’s roughly $25 billion budget.
“I'm proud to be part of an announcement like this today that makes our Keystone state very, very proud because places like Astrobotic are the future of the space program,” Mr. Cartwright said.
At the nearby Carnegie Science Center, the Keystone Space Collaborative Inaugural Conference will be held through Thursday, and it features panels on the space industry, capital investments and career development. A plenary session on the regional space ecosystem was introduced by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and sponsored by West Virginia University Corporate Relations. Other participants and sponsors included several regional universities, tech leaders, local STEM educators, and private companies from the area and from as far as Minnesota.
The Keystone Space Collaborative, the organization that hosted the conference, was founded last year to attract space industry businesses to Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.
“We see a tremendous opportunity for this region in the new space economy, and one of the first things our organization did was did an assessment of who's who in the region and the results of that were astounding,” said Justine Kasznica, the collaborative’s founding board chair.
Ms. Kasznica estimates there are over 1,200 participants in the regional “space ecosystem.”
This is not the first time Pittsburgh and Astrobotic were center stage in the national conversation about technology and space exploration. The company, founded in 2007 as a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University, hosted Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in September.
The company has two fully funded lunar missions on the horizon and has 60 prior and current NASA and commercial contracts worth more than $350 million, according to company statistics.
Ashley Murray: amurray@post-gazette.com
First Published: April 20, 2022, 5:01 p.m.
Updated: April 21, 2022, 9:52 a.m.