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These will be just the latest firsts in a gradual ramping up of the commercial space economy. A dozen more firms are expected to follow in the next six years, carrying cargo that ranges from a magnetometer and supplies for a future lunar base camp to small amounts of cremated human remains. Competing lunar start-up Intuitive Machines is set to launch its lunar lander, Nova-C, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, also by the end of this year. Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander is due to ride on United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket, scheduled to make its inaugural voyage before the end of 2022. The coming lunar fleet will consist of private spacecraft carrying science experiments and other cargo for paying customers, including NASA. The arrivals won’t be human-at least not yet-and they won’t even be government-built. Sometime in the next four or five months, the first American moon missions in half a century will make a return to Earth’s satellite. “All of a sudden, in late October, started showing up,” Walker says. Since then, Walker has been readying payloads like SEAL. But in 2018 NASA came calling with a funding scheme that would turn Astrobotic into one of several moon ferries by the middle of this decade. Since its founding in 2007 as a scrappy competitor for the now defunct Google Lunar XPRIZE, Astrobotic had been working on its lander and signing deals with companies that wanted to put instruments on it, planning for a launch eventually. Peregrine is scheduled to launch later this year-and it is just one of many missions that private companies are scrambling to send up after years of preparation.

The instrument-Surface and Exosphere Alterations by Landers, or SEAL-was a shoebox-sized sensor designed to study how a spacecraft’s landing disturbs moon dust. The vehicle, called Peregrine, was a four-legged, foil-wrapped canister as big as a hot tub.

One day last December, John Walker Moosbrugger, a 25-year-old project manager for the lunar robotics start-up Astrobotic, sat in front of the company’s clean room and watched as an instrument older than him was attached to a moon lander.

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