A satellite the size of a microwave oven was successfully released from Earth orbit on Monday and headed for the moon, the latest step in NASA’s plan to land astronauts on the lunar surface again. It has already been an unusual journey for the Capstone satellite. It was launched six days ago from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula by Rocket Lab on one of its small Electron rockets. It will take another four months for the satellite to reach the moon, as it travels using minimal energy. Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck told The Associated Press that it was hard to put his excitement into words. “It’s probably going to take a while to sink in. It’s been a project that’s taken us two, two and a half years and it’s just incredibly, incredibly difficult to pull off,” he said. “So to see it all come together tonight and see this spacecraft on its way to the moon is absolutely epic.” Beck said the relatively low cost of the mission — NASA put it at $32.7 million — marked the beginning of a new era for space exploration. “For about tens of millions of dollars, there is now a rocket and a spacecraft that can take you to the moon, to asteroids, to Venus, to Mars,” Beck said. “It’s a crazy ability that’s never existed before.” If the rest of the mission is successful, the Capstone satellite will send back vital information for months as the first to make a new orbit around the moon called a nearly rectilinear halo orbit: a stretched-egg shape with one end of the orbit passing close on the moon and the other away from it. Eventually, NASA plans to put a space station called Gateway into orbit, from which astronauts can land on the surface of the Moon as part of the Artemis program. Beck said the advantage of the new orbit is that it minimizes fuel use and allows the satellite — or a space station — to remain in constant contact with Earth. The Electron rocket launched on June 28 from New Zealand carried a second spacecraft called Photon, which separated after nine minutes. The satellite was carried for six days on the Photon, with the spacecraft’s engines firing periodically to raise its orbit further and further away from Earth. A final engine blast on Monday allowed the Photon to break free of Earth’s gravitational pull and send the satellite on its way. The plan is now for the 25-kilogram (55-pound) satellite to go far beyond the moon before falling back into the new lunar orbit on Nov. 13. The satellite will use small amounts of fuel to make some planned course corrections along the way. Beck said they would decide in the coming days what to do with the Photon, which had completed its mission and still had some fuel in the tank. “There are a number of very interesting missions we can do with it,” Beck said. For the mission, NASA partnered with two commercial companies: California-based Rocket Lab and Colorado-based Advanced Space, which owns and operates the Capstone satellite.
