On June 28 at 09:55 UTC, a Rocket Lab Electron/Lunar Photon launched NASA’s CAPSTONE spacecraft from Launch Complex-1 on the Mahia peninsula in New Zealand.

The NASA co-host was in Florida, set up in front of the SLS rocket still at 39A, which I thought was pretty interesting. There were none of the usual onboard cameras because of the need for more telemetry bandwidth, but the animation replacing it was very well done.

The launch was completely successful, and Lunar Photon will burn six times over the next six days to raise CAPSTONE towards the Moon. After those burns, CAPSTONE will take four months to reach the Moon on its ballistic capture trajectory. Once there, the spacecraft will perform its mission by evaluating the Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit, the special orbit that the Gateway station will use.

You can follow along on CAPSTONE’s long journey using NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System, a web app made by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We’ll have a link to it in our show notes for this episode.

More Information

NASA press release