Navajo Nation’s objection to landing human remains on the moon prompts last-minute White House meeting Some are additional science payloads from nations such as Mexico, while others include a robotics experiment from a private UK-based company and trinkets or mementos that the German shipping company DHL put together.Īstrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander is encapsulated with Ula's Vulcan rocket. The other 15 come from a range of customers. Of the 20 payloads that Peregrine will carry to the moon, five are NASA science instruments. The space agency paid Astrobotic $108 million to develop Peregrine and fly NASA’s science experiments to the lunar surface.īut the space agency is just one customer among many for this mission. But our team and the people that supported us believed in the mission, and they created this beautiful moment that we’re seeing today.” “And along the way, we had a lot of hard challenges that we had to overcome and a lot of people doubted us along the way. “It’s a dream … For 16 years we’ve been pushing for this moment today,” Astrobotic CEO John Thornton said during a webcast of the launch. Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic Technology developed the Peregrine lander - named after the falcon that is the fastest-flying bird in the world - under a contract with NASA.

Jfk arrived flight