The debut flight of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur V — known as Certification-1 — has been scheduled for Dec. 24, Christmas Eve.
The Vulcan was supposed to launch in May but was delayed after a Centaur upper stage exploded during testing at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center on March 29.
The Dec. 24 launch will be the first of two missions required to demonstrate the rocket’s performance for high-priority National Space Security Launch spacecraft.
The payloads that will be carried by the Vulcan Centaur are arriving in Cape Canaveral ahead of the scheduled launch.
One notable cargo item — a privately owned lunar lander — arrived in Florida on Oct. 30. That lander will carry the cremated remains of the original "Star Trek" series creator Gene Rodenberry and those of cast member Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed the character Nyota Uhura, among others.
Houston-based Celestis Inc. is the company behind the “memorial spaceflights” of Rodenberry’s and Nichols’ ashes. The cremated remains of another 332 people will be part of this spaceflight.
The company offers the posthumous trip to and from space with prices starting at $2,995. To launch ashes into Earth orbit costs upwards of $4,995, and launching into lunar orbit, onto the moon’s surface or into deep space is $12,995 and up.
Celestis Inc. was founded in 1994 and sent up the first payload of cremated human remains in 1997, aboard a Northrup Grumman Pegasus rocket launching from the Canary Islands. Some of Gene Rodenberry’s ashes were on that flight, too, along with 23 others.
Related:
How launching cremated remains has grown into a booming business at Cape Canaveral
First U.S. lunar landing mission since 1972 to launch from Cape Canaveral
The next memorial spaceflight — on Christmas Eve if all goes as planned — is not the Vulcan Centaur's main mission, however. That spot goes to the Peregrine lunar lander, made by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, Pa. The lunar lander will be placed on a trajectory to the moon and will attempt an autonomous landing north of the Gruithuisen crater.
This is the maiden Peregrine mission, and it will carry a laser retro-reflector array, linear energy transfer spectrometer, near-infrared volatile spectrometer system, Prospect ion-trap mass spectrometer, neutron spectrometer system and Celestis capsules, among other things. Peregrine lunar landers will deliver up to 585 pounds of science and technology payload on each mission going forward.
If Peregine successfully lands on the moon, it will be the first unmanned American moon landing since 1968, the final year of the Surveyor program. The last manned American mission to make a soft landing on the moon was NASA's Apollo 17.
Astrobotic won a 10-year Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract in 2018 to make moon deliveries for NASA. A news release said Commercial Lunar Payload Services would leverage the private sector to deliver cargo as part of NASA’s plan to return to the moon.
Amazon Kuiper prototype satellites — KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 — would have been payloads on the March flight, but due to the setback, Amazon had to switch to the Atlas V, also a United Launch Alliance product. The Kuiper satellites were successfully launched on Oct. 6.
Amazon has 38 partly reusable Vulcan rockets on order as part of the multibillion-dollar launch contracts it has secured for Project Kuiper.
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