NASA satellite breaks Earth orbit, travels to moon

At NASA’s latest attempt to return humans to the moon, a satellite with the size of a microwave oven has successfully broke free from its orbit on Monday and now is heading toward the moon.

It was difficult for Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck to put his enthusiasm into words, as he told the Associated Press.

“It’s probably going to take a while to sink in. It’s been a project that has taken us two, two-and-a-half years and is just incredibly, incredibly difficult to execute,” adding, “So to see it all come together tonight and see that spacecraft on its way to the moon, it’s just absolutely epic.”

Beck said the mission’s low cost — NASA estimated it at $32.7 million — signified the dawn of a new era in space exploration.

Beck stated that “for some 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. It’s an insane capability that’s never existed before.”

First, a new orbit around the moon is termed a near-rectilinear halo: an egg shape with one end traveling close to the moon and the other far from it. This is the first time this type of orbit has been attempted, and Capstone will bring back critical information for months.

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A space station named Gateway will eventually be built into orbit, from which people will be able to descend to the moon’s surface as part of NASA’s Artemis program.

It’s a win-win situation, according to Beck, because the new orbit reduces fuel consumption and keeps the satellite (or a space station) in regular contact with Earth.

During the launch of the Electron rocket from New Zealand on June 28, a second spacecraft named Photon detached from the rocket nine minutes later. The satellite was carried on for six days in Photon, with the spacecraft’s engines regularly firing to elevate its orbit farther and farther from Earth.

After the last engine burn on Monday, Photon was able to escape the gravitational pull of the Earth and launch the satellite into orbit. Once the 25-kilogram (55-pound) satellite reaches its new lunar orbit on Nov. 13, the objective is to bring it back to Earth. Small amounts of fuel will be used to correct the satellite’s trajectory a few times along the journey.

In the coming days, Beck continued, they’d determine what to do with Photon, which had finished its missions but still had some fuel in its tank.

NASA collaborated on the project with two private companies: Rocket Lab in California and Advanced Space in Colorado, which owns and maintains the Capstone satellite.