As you may or may not recall (it’s been several years now!), I took advantage of an opportunity in January 2021 to include a digital image of my painting Velocity on a shielded microSD card loaded onto the Peregrine lunar lander. I’m a space enthusiast who got a kick out of the idea that I’d have a digital artwork archive on the Moon as well as Earth, and other blog readers thought it was really cool as well; someone shared the news with the Sioux City Journal such that there ended up being local press coverage about it!
The Peregrine was initially supposed to go up in late 2021, but it was delayed for a variety of reasons including pandemic supply chain troubles. For a couple of years, the launch date just kept getting pushed back. Finally, at the beginning of this year, it was ready. On January 8th, 2024, the Peregrine was launched… but by January 18th, it had reentered Earth’s atmosphere, burned, and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. After months of investigation concluded, it turns out that a faulty valve was to blame.
As the “first contracted mission of NASA's commercial lunar payload program,” this was a rather sad conclusion which means that I am at present still just a terrestrial artist.
