When United Launch Alliance's new rocket, the Vulcan's centaur, makes its maiden flight, it will mark a milestone, not only for the launch industry, but for America's moon ambitions as well.

The Vulcan will carry to space the Paragreen, a robotic lunar lander built owned and operated

by Astrobatic, a space startup born out of Carnegie Mellon University.

If all goes according to plan,

Astrobatic could become the first company ever

to successfully put a privately owned lander on the moon.

Undertaking this has been 16 years in the making, says

CEO John Thornton in a paradigm shift that's also economic. Our first mission

will fly and land of the surface of the moon for on order of $100 million.

We don't go to specifics on how much we've actually generated from the customers, but it gives

you just a sense of scale.

Typically missions like this would be in the hundreds of millions, multi hundreds of millions.

So we're really breaking the paradigm on that.

That's affording much more affordable and routine access for our nation scientists. So typically, if you're a scientist,

if you're a scientist,

maybe you get one shot in your long-tenured career

to take a mission of science up to some place in space. But with this approach and if you're going to have two to maybe three landers landing every year on the surface of the moon bringing these packages, you can do, go back to the moon again and again with your science and update it and go to

different locations and that's just game-changing for how we've approached space

for decades. Lift-off is scheduled for as soon as Monday morning.

Paragreen Mission 1 will carry payloads for seven countries

and some commercial customers,

including the cremines of a few Star Trek luminaries.

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