Overview
- The company publicly displayed the fully integrated Griffin‑1 lander on Monday, June 15, inside its Pittsburgh clean room as officials from NASA, Voyager and industry partners attended the unveiling.
- Astrobotic says Griffin‑1 is an infrastructure-class lander built to carry heavy cargo and power systems and is already integrated with several payloads while the largest payload, Astrolab’s 500‑kg FLIP rover, will be added at Cape Canaveral before launch.
- Engineers will ship Griffin‑1 to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for an environmental test campaign in the coming weeks, then return it to Pittsburgh for final work and move it to Kennedy Space Center for FLIP integration and launch processing.
- Astrobotic added redundant, dissimilar valve systems and other design and test changes after the Peregrine propulsion valve failure to reduce the chance of a repeat anomaly during Griffin’s powered phases.
- Voyager’s announced acquisition of Astrobotic signals fresh investment in lunar infrastructure and the mission will serve as an early, operational test for NASA’s Moon Base program as the agency seeks more reliable landings and higher mission cadence.