Astrobotic’s Peregrine-1 lunar lander (2024)
Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, launching aboard ULA’s Vulcan Centaur on its inaugural fight, never got the chance to perform a lunar landing. The lander, funded under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, leaked critical amounts of propellant shortly after reaching space on January 8, 2004, the result of a faulty valve. Peregrine was supposed to deliver over 20 different payloads to the lunar surface, including a batch of NASA instruments, a swarm of tiny robots from Mexico, a German radiation detector, a student-built rover, time capsules, and a physical bitcoin. Painfully, the lander was also packed with DNA (in the form of hair samples) and the cremated remains of over 200 individuals, in what was meant as a space memorial mission chartered by Celestis and Elysium Space.
