Astrobotic unveils Griffin-1 lunar lander

PITTSBURGH — Astrobotic showed off the lunar lander it plans to launch later this year that will be the vanguard of NASA’s new lunar base ambitions. At a June 15 event at its headquarters, the company revealed its Griffin-1 lander. The company is completing final work on the lander before shipping it to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California for environmental tests in the next few weeks. After those tests are complete, Griffin will return to Astrobotic for final integration work before shipping to Florida for launch preparations. The lander is projected to launch in the fourth quarter of this year on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Griffin will deliver 10 payloads from six nations to the moon, led by the FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP) robotic rover from Astrolab. The 500-kilogram rover will be the heaviest commercial payload landed on the moon to date. “This is the first infrastructure-class lander going to the surface of the moon,” said John Thornton, chief executive of Astrobotic, at a press conference, citing its ability in the future to deliver power systems and other equipment. “This lander will be part of the cornerstone of building up the moon base.” Griffin-1 is Astrobotic’s second lunar lander mission. The company’s first mission, Peregrine, launched in January 2024 but suffered a propulsion malfunction hours after launch that prevented it from attempting a lunar landing. “We learned a lot” from Peregrine, Thornton said. The company was able to operate the lander in cislunar space for a week and a half and determined that nothing beyond the failed valve would have prevented it from attempting a landing. “The Griffin lander behind me has integrated all of those lessons learned,” he said. “This lander has a dual, redundant valve system with two dissimilar valves that both have to fail to have the same outcome. That will not happen. We are done with valve issues on our landers.” “Programmatically, it is fundamentally different than how we operated with Peregrine,” Thornton said in a later interview. “Peregrine was designed to be the lowest-cost mission that could fly as fast as it could. With Griffin, it was always designed from the outset to fly a very complex science mission from NASA.” “We’ve done way more testing on this vehicle than we did with Peregrine, and also incorporated all the lessons learned from Peregrine,” he said. “It’s as robust as we know how to do it.” The company is similarly confident in its ability to land safely. Griffin uses an autonomous landing system that includes terrain relative navigation, where an onboard computer compares images of the surface from the lander’s cameras with a map to determine its position: “Neil Armstrong in a box,” said Andrew Horchler, chief research scientist at Astrobotic, in an interview. That will be supplemented with a navigation Doppler lidar when the lander is a few kilometers above the surface, and then a hazard-detection lidar just above the surface that can detect obsta…