PITTSBURGH — The Peregrine was on track to be the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since the Apollo program ended 50 years ago. Channel 11′s Alyssa Raymond spoke with the CEO of Astrobotic, John Thornton, for the first time since the mission.
“It was a wild ride,” said Astrobotic CEO John Thornton.
That emotional rollercoaster for Astrobotic CEO John Thornton started with the launch of the Peregrine on Jan. 8.
“It was a perfect launch and that was a super exciting moment, and we were on that high and within a few hours we got to a super low,” said Thornton. “That was really challenging that dramatic change, but I think what lifted us up shortly after that was seeing that the team was fighting.”
That super low hit hours after launch with a propulsion anomaly.
“We have our best guesses right now of what occurred, but we really need to figure out was it something in the system?” said Thornton. “Was it a failed material in the valve? Was it the valve itself that was faulty?”
The mission was supposed to take about 45 days from launch to landing and would have included 3 lunar orbits to get Peregrine on the surface of the moon. A team made up of about 16 people worked on little sleep on Pittsburgh’s North Side to keep the Lander operational.
“They focused on let’s debug this thing,” said Thornton. “Let’s figure out what’s going on. Let’s figure out how we can at least improve this situation. And that worked. It was paramount. That is what changed the mission around from what could have been a few hours long mission to a 10-day long mission.”
“A lot of the subsystems that we developed,” said Astrobotic Peregrine Mission Director Sharad Bhaskaran. “The power system. The avionic system. The comms system. A lot of that worked, and it worked in space for 10 days. That’s a pretty significant achievement.”
Next, Astrobotic plans to use the successes and failures in developing its next lander, Griffin.
“One of the things that I’ve heard in the industry is failure is a rite of passage in this industry, which means that you almost have to fail at some point to understand what to do differently next time,” said Bhaskaran.
“I think we’re very very well positioned for a successful landing on our next mission because mission one did what it did,” said Thorton.
The Griffin Lander is still slated to launch late this year. That could change though depending on what the review board ends up finding out about the Peregrine.
“I’m excited about being an ambassador for the region, and I think this is an opportunity for a whole new region of the country to get involved in space and to have access to space in whole new ways and that’s what I’m very excited about,” said Thornton. “I feel the responsibility to make sure that that next mission is successful so that our first steps into the industry can be successful, and I ultimately feel for the community that we weren’t successful on the first one but I can assure you that we’re going to do everything we possibly can to make our city and our region proud of our activities in space. "
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