ULA readies for Vulcan’s debut launch, while concerns over two of its payloads arise

On Friday ULA rolled out its first fully integrated Vulcan rocket, payload included, to ready it for launch early Monday morning. However, a last second meeting at the White House was called over one of the payloads hitching a ride to the Moon.

Update: ULA successfully launched Vulcan, however, Astrobotic has run into some issues orienting the lander.

Vulcan at the launch pad

Early Friday morning ULA rolled its first Vulcan rocket out of its vertical integration facility on the new Vulcan Launch Platform. This platform is similar to what is currently used for the Atlas V, but designed to hold the larger Vulcan rocket. It travels roughly 500 meters on rails to the launch pad.

On top is a commercial lunar lander built by Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh based company, which hopes to become the first commercial lander to successfully land on the Moon. Astrobotic’s business model will be to provide lunar landing services to those that wish to pay for space on its landers. One of its biggest customers will be NASA.

As part of the Commercial Lunar Payloads Services program, Astrobotic will provide lunar landing services to NASA. Similar to the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, the spacecraft are not owned by them and Astrobotic can provide service to whomever they wish.

Alongside the frenzy of scientific payloads from NASA, other countries, and universities, the lander also has some less scientific missions hitching a ride. Some of these payloads are simple hard drives holding anything from images and cryptocurrency to full on backups of humanity’s online knowledge.

Two missions however are memorial missions managed by Celestis and Elysium – cremated remains of those wishing to have part of them buried beyond Earth. A niche business in the ever growing commercial space sector and is something that not everyone has been 100% on board with.

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Navajo Nation protest memorial lunar missions

This week the Navajo Nation, one of the largest group of Native Americans, came out against the mission as it believes would “desecrate” the Moon, which is considered sacred in many Native American religions. “To send something like that over there is sacrilege,” Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said in a statement.

This isn’t the first time Native Americans have called NASA out for “desecrating” the Moon with human remains. In 1999 NASA delivered ashes of former Apollo astronaut candidate Eugene Shoemaker. The mission, Lunar Prospector, was a direct impact mission and was funded and managed by the federal agency. NASA agreed to consult Native Americans on future missions containing human remains to the Moon.

Now in the age of commercial spaceflight, NASA has given up a lot of the control it has as to what companies do with spare space on its missions. However, the majority of the funding still comes from US taxpayers. A tool the Navajo Nation wants NASA to leverage to stop this from happening.

Both Celestis and Elysium have made comments to CNN against the Navajo’s opinion of the mission.

A major issue with the Navajo’s protest is it came years since these missions were manifested the flight and publicly announced. Payload manifests were shared by Astrobotic in 2015 and 2020 but the Navajo waited until a week before launch to protest.

CNN reported that Friday evening a last minute meeting was held at the White House with officials from NASA and the Department of Transportation, the outcome of that meeting is unknown. However, the launch still seems goo for launch Monday morning.

The issue with delaying Vulcan’s debut flight is less about Astrobotic’s mission. Yes, this would be an inconvenience to remove a payload and reintegrate the lander on Vulcan. Most likely delaying the flight by a few months.

The issue is more with delaying the first certification flight for Vulcan in general. For the Space Force and ULA, this is a really big deal to get its first of two certification flights up. The Space Force is in desperate need of getting Vulcan launching National Security Space Launch (NSSL) missions this year and if there’s anything we know that are not to be messed with, that’s NSSL launches.