RobotRisk Autonomous Systems Incident & Risk Register
RobotRisk / Astrobotic / 2024-01-09

Peregrine lunar lander propellant leak forces abandonment of Moon landing

S4 · 01/09
2024 · Astrobotic

Record

CompanyAstrobotic
Categoryspace robotics
Typemission-loss
Date01/09
2024
Time of daynot documented
Locationno physical site (recall / fleet-wide / aggregate record)
SeverityS4 (serious injury, total loss, or grounding)
Scale1 lander, total mission loss
Confidencehigh
VerificationYes - adversarially checked against the cited source
SourceSpaceflight Now

What happened

Shortly after launch on a ULA Vulcan Centaur rocket, Astrobotic's Peregrine lander suffered a propulsion valve failure that caused a critical propellant leak; the company aborted the planned lunar landing and the lander burned up reentering Earth's atmosphere after a 10-day mission.

Astrobotic record context

Astrobotic vs space robotics alternatives

space robotics context

space robotics: entries by year

232023 S4: 11232024 S4: 33242025 S4: 2225
S1S2S3S4S5

space robotics: failure modes

space robotics: most entries

mission-loss context

mission-loss: by category

mission-loss: by year

mission-loss: severity profile

Comparable mission-loss events in space robotics

SevDateCompanyEvent
S42025-06-05ispaceHAKUTO-R Mission 2 (Resilience) lander crashes on second lunar landing attempt
S42025-03-06Intuitive MachinesIM-2 Athena lander topples over in shadowed crater, mission ends early
S42024-03-01Maxar SpaceNASA cancels $2B OSAM-1 robotic satellite-servicing mission over Maxar performance
S42024-02-22Intuitive MachinesIM-1 Odysseus lander tips over on lunar touchdown
S42023-04-25ispaceHAKUTO-R Mission 1 lander crashes into Moon

Other Astrobotic entries

Also from Critical Systems Analysis: CSA - functional safety engineering · Company directory · FSTalent - functional safety jobs