ULA Group's new Vulcan-Centaur rocket carrying an American lunar lander, which could become the first private spacecraft to successfully land on the moon, arrived at its launch pad in Florida on Friday ahead of liftoff on Monday.
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The almost 62 meter high rocket was taken out of its hangar and traveled the few hundred meters between it and the launch site, said ULA, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
The Vulcan Centaur's first launch is scheduled for Monday at 2:18 a.m. local time (07:18 GMT) from Cape Canaveral.
Vulcan Centaur was intended to allow ULA to offer more affordable launches by replacing its Atlas V and Delta IV launch vehicles. The new rocket will be capable of carrying up to 27.2 tons to low Earth orbit, a load comparable to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.
The mission, ambitious for a first flight, carries in particular the ashes of personalities from the Star Trek series and a lunar landing ship from the American start-up Astrobotic, which also contains scientific experiments from NASA.
The lunar landing attempt is scheduled for February 23rd.
If the mission is successful, Astrobotic could be the first American lander to land on the moon since the end of the Apollo program more than 50 years ago. And the first private company to achieve this feat.
Israeli and Japanese companies have attempted to land on the moon in recent years, but those missions ended in crashes.
Japan is also scheduled to attempt to land on the moon in two weeks, but this will be a mission by the country's space agency (Jaxa). Russia, on the other hand, spectacularly missed a moon landing this summer.
So far, only the USA, the Soviet Union, China and India have managed to successfully land a device on the moon.
The American space agency wants to send astronauts back to the moon with its Artemis program. It is therefore aiming to build a lunar economy so that it can rely on private companies to ship equipment, for example.
It provided Astrobotic with important funding by entering into a contract with the company to transport scientific technologies and experiments.
As part of the same program called CLPS, another American company, Intuitive Machines, was also contracted by NASA to provide such a service. His device will be launched by a SpaceX rocket, with launch currently scheduled for mid-February.