A small NASA satellite is headed for the moon following its break from the Earth’s orbit on Monday, one week after it was launched from New Zealand by the American aerospace company Rocket Lab.
The Capstone satellite’s journey to the moon is expected to take four months, according to Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck, and will spend months transmitting important information to NASA from a new orbit around the moon.
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“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,” Beck said, according to Fox Business. “So to see it all come together tonight and see that spacecraft on its way to the moon, it’s just absolutely epic.”
The satellite was transported to space in a spacecraft called Photon, which broke from its initial rocket nine minutes after the launch. Photon carried the satellite for six days before it separated on Monday. NASA said the journey cost $32.7 million, which Beck said shows the potential for space exploration at a relatively low cost.
“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,” Beck said. “It’s an insane capability that’s never existed before.”
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The mission is the next step in the Artemis program, the government’s plan to put astronauts on the moon again. NASA said it eventually plans to place a space station in orbit where astronauts can descend to the moon’s surface.
The next step for the small satellite, which is roughly the size of a microwave, is to overshoot the moon before falling back into the new orbit on Nov. 13.
