THE NEW SPACE RACE: New Vulcan rocket sends privately-built Moon lander to space.

The launch of Vulcan, a 200-foot (60-m) tall rocket with engines made by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, was a crucial first for ULA, which developed the rocket to replace its workhorse Atlas V rocket and rival the reusable Falcon 9 from Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the satellite launch market.

The stakes were high for Vulcan. Boeing and Lockheed, which own ULA in a 50-50 split, have been seeking a sale of the business for roughly a year. And the launch was the first of two certification flights required by the U.S. Space Force before Vulcan can fly lucrative missions for the Pentagon, a key customer.

Peregrine is set to land on the moon on Feb. 23 with 20 payloads aboard, most of which will seek to gather data about the lunar surface ahead of planned future human missions. It marks the first trek to the moon’s surface as part of NASA’s Artemis moon program.

There’s a lot riding on Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines, which seem to have performed beautifully.