The rocket destined to take Astrobotic Technology Inc.'s Peregrine Lunar Lander to outer space has seen its anticipated launch date delayed after an explosion occurred during a testing exercise in Alabama.
On March 29, Tory Bruno, the CEO of Colorado-based spacecraft makers United Launch Alliance LLC, announced on his personal Twitter account that ULA's Vulcan Centaur V rocket had experienced "an anomaly," which preceded a tweet he shared on April 13 that showed a video of an explosion that occurred outside of a testing rig that housed the ULA rocket. He alluded to a hydrogen-related leak as being a possible culprit and in response the next day to other replies, Bruno said in a tweet that "June/July" will be the next earliest estimated launch timeline.
That timeline is the same one that John Thornton, CEO of North Side-based Astrobotic, shared during a speech as part of a kickoff event for the Aviation and Robotics Summit in the Strip District on Tuesday. Following the speech, Thornton told Pittsburgh Inno that the "rapid unplanned disassembly" — the engineer's term for an explosion — experienced during testing is exactly why such tests occur in the first place to avoid the possibility of it happening on launch day.
"We're going to be flying in June or July," Thornton told a crowd of about 300 people who were attending the event, which featured an opening address from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. "I believe the biggest thing that we should take away from all of this is the excitement, the possibility and quite literally: If Pittsburgh can land on the moon, Pittsburgh can do anything."
ULA and Astrobotic previously anticipated a May 4 launch for the rocket, which will transport Peregrine and other payloads to space. Peregrine will then travel on its own for about a month to the moon before it plans to land on its surface and, if successful, it will mark the first time an American spacecraft has returned to the moon since the end of the Apollo program.
