America’s first lunar mission in over 50 years started promisingly enough.

During the early morning hours of Jan. 8, a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, carrying the Astrobotic Peregrine lunar lander into space. The new launch vehicle’s systems, including the BE-4 engines provided by Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin, worked nominally. However, the Peregrine experienced a serious glitch that has forestalled any attempted lunar landing.

A few hours after launch, Astrobotic posted on X that an anomaly prevented Peregrine from pointing its solar panels at the sun. Later the company determined that the cause was a fault in the propulsion system for the spacecraft’s altitude control system. The glitch caused the spacecraft’s battery to be depleted to a dangerously low level. Ground controllers executed a maneuver to reorient the solar panels toward the sun.

The maneuver proved successful and the battery was recharged, However, Astrobotic ground controllers later determined that the fault in the propulsion system caused a critical loss of propellant. They also........

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