The private American lunar lander that took off this Monday, January 8, 2024 has no chance of being able to land gently on the Moon as planned, the company Astrobotic, which developed the device, said last Tuesday.
An anomaly occurred preventing Astrobotic from achieving a stable orientation facing the Sun, due to a fuel leak: “There is unfortunately no chance of a soft landing on the Moon,” the company declared in a statement published on X (formerly Twitter). The lander, named Peregrine, was developed by the start-up Astrobotic, with the support of NASA, which commissioned this company to transport scientific equipment to the Moon, for a contract worth $108 million. The launch inaugurated a series of lunar missions supported by the American space agency, eager to encourage the development of a lunar economy. In recent years, private Israeli and Japanese companies have also attempted to land on the moon, but these missions ended in crashes. To date, only four nations, the United States, the Soviet Union, China and India, have successfully landed a device on the Moon.
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