At 2:18 a.m. Monday, a rocket is scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida that — if all goes according to plan — will return Pittsburgh to the moon 50 years after the Apollo missions.
There won’t be any human astronauts on the rocket, made by United Launch Alliance, or its lander, made by North Side’s Astrobotic.
But there will be a small sample of dried human blood.
And some goat DNA.
Both oddities are part of MoonArk, a miniature art capsule curated by students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University.
"It's not just DNA from any goat," said Richard Pell, founder of Pittsburgh's Center for PostNatural History. "It's from a goat genetically modified to produce spider silk proteins in her milk."
The blood is slightly more of a mystery. It was collected decades ago by the late Lowry Burgess, a former CMU dean and space art pioneer.
“Only he knew whose blood was collected but we understand it was from some of the most creative minds," said Mark Baskinger, a CMU design professor who led the development of MoonArk.
It’s part of a proud tradition of sending art and other mementos to space, he said. A golden record of whale noises and Bach melodies has been hurtling to the edge of the solar system on a Voyager probe since 1977. On the moon, miniature sketches from Andy Warhol and a 3.5-inch aluminum "Fallen Astronaut" sculpture serve as memorials of previous missions.
A new era of space exploration
Astrobotic’s lander will lose power about eight days after it lands, meaning all of its payloads — from art to scientific instruments — will join the lineage of leftover fragments.
There is no return trip planned.
Before powering down, Peregrine will release Iris, a rover built by CMU students.
Iris is no larger than a shoebox and its mission is simple: snag a photo of the lander and send it back to the university’s campus, where graduate and undergraduate students will be piloting the tiny vessel, nearly 240,000 miles away.
The lander will also release a scrum of bug-sized robots from Mexico and will check for radiation using a German-built device. For NASA, Peregrine is carrying tools the agency will need to hone for its Artemis program and other human missions to the lunar surface.
The variety of passengers speaks to a new era of space exploration led by private companies that is open to a broader swath of participants. Astrobotic charged about $1,000 per gram to send payloads to the lunar surface. “Making the Moon more accessible,” is part of its core mission.
Astrobotic partnered with the software simulation company Ansys to prepare for its maiden voyage. Programs helped determine the best trajectory and ways to stay in contact. They also gave the team its closest approximation of what the real mission will be like.
"Astrobotic needed Peregrine to perform predictably in a hostile environment, and there is no way to do that with only physical testing on Earth,” Shane Emswiler, senior vice president of products at Ansys, said in a statement.
When it comes time to land, however, Peregrine will have to make key decisions all on its own.
It’s too risky with delays in communication to try to manually control the spacecraft, said Ander Solorzano, one of five Astrobotic flight directors who will trade off once Peregrine is in the air, continuously monitoring the lander on its month-long trip.
“For launch and separation, there are a lot of activities that our mission operations team could do,” he said. "We’re seeing telemetry come in, we're seeing the spacecraft respond to space for the very first time.”
For landing, it’s a different story.
"We basically get ready days in advance,” Mr. Solorzano said. The team will transmit one last set of commands, called absolute time sequences, to refine Peregrine's trajectory and approach as much as possible.
“Then once that is loaded, we're basically hands off. We’re gonna watch the spacecraft do what it needs to do."
‘Daddy’s gonna send a lander up there’
He said other groups’ attempts to land on the moon have operated the same way, with humans making initial adjustments and a computer finishing the job.
India succeeded with that approach in August. Just a few months prior, however, a private Japanese lander crashed after a crater reportedly threw off its onboard computer.
The world watched both launches to see whether a new future of lunar exploration was possible.
But for Astrobotic, some of the most valued fans are even closer to home.
Mr. Solorzano’s father has become of the startup’s most stalwart boosters, sharing almost every update on social media and posting childhood photos of his son. Sharad Bhaskaran, the overall Peregrine mission director, is also eager to share the launch with his father, who will be tuning in from India.
A live feed of the launch will be available on NASA’s YouTube channel and other social media platforms.
John Thornton, the CMU alumnus who founded Astrobotic 16 years ago, will be sharing the launch with his two young daughters. When the older one watches simulation videos, he said, she cheers Peregrine along its journey.
“Every time she says, “Go lander, go lander, go,’” Mr. Thornton said. “And when she looks up at the moon, she says, ‘Daddy’s gonna send a lander up there.’"
It’s one of the silver linings of a lengthy contract process and a handful of launch delays.
After so much time in development, Mr. Thornton said it was a bit surreal to finally be so close to a launch.
“It's going to be a gnarly day,” he said. "I’m going to be a mess of emotion. It'll be equal parts excitement and thrill and also terrifying at the same time.”
As of print deadline, January 8 remained the start of a four-day launch window. If the launch is delayed, it will still have three more chances to take off. The tentative landing date is set for February 23.
Evan Robinson-Johnson: ejohnson@post-gazette.com and @sightsonwheels
First Published: January 7, 2024, 10:30 a.m.
