
A mission to put the first commercial craft on the moon appears to be in jeopardy after the spacecraft suffered a “critical loss” of fuel in a major blow to the United States’s hopes of placing its first robot on the lunar surface in five decades.
Vulcan – a United Launch Alliance (ULA) rocket carrying the robotic lunar lander Peregrine, built by space robotics firm Astrobotic Technology – was launched on Monday at 2:18am (07:18 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida.