Japan’s Bid to Make First Commercial Moon Landing Ends in Failure
“We lost the communication, so we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface.”
I recently noted that SpaceX engineers were delighted with the data gathered in the wake of the Starship test launch that ended in a spectacular “flight termination” sequence.
Now Japan’s engineers are reflecting upon their recent attempt at the first commercial moon landing, which ended in failure.
Japanese startup ispace (9348.T) assumed its attempt to make the first private moon landing had failed on Tuesday as engineers struggled to regain contact with the company’s Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) lander long after it was due for a lunar touchdown.
“We lost the communication, so we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface,” ispace Chief Executive Takeshi Hakamada said on a company live stream, as mission control engineers in Tokyo continued to try regaining contact with its lander.
The M1 lander appeared set to autonomously touch down around 12:40 p.m. Eastern time (1640 GMT Tuesday) after coming as close as 295 feet (90 meters) from the lunar surface, a live animation of the lander’s telemetry showed.
As with the Starship launch, Japan’s engineers are trying to make the most of the data obtained during this mission.
Minutes passed as the mission control team worked to regain contact with the vehicle after an expected communications blackout. About 20 minutes after the planned landing time, Ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada delivered an update.
“We have not been able to confirm successful landing,” he said. “We have to assume…that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface. Our engineers continue to investigate the situation.”
He added that his team was able to gather data from the vehicle right up until the attempted landing, a “great achievement” that should help inform future Ispace missions.
The lunar lander, called Hakuto-R, was carrying the Rashid rover — the first Arab-built lunar spacecraft, which was built by Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai.
In history, only three countries have ever executed a controlled landing on the moon — the United States, the former Soviet Union and China. The US remains the only country to have put humans on the moon.
Had it been successful, Japanese company Ispace would have been the first private company to achieve a successful Moon landing. However, it shows the increasing potential for private firms to be robust players in the new space race.
The lander carried with it a few things, most notably a lunar rover from the United Arab Emirates called the Rashid lunar rover. According to a New York Times article, the M1 also carried along “a two-wheeled transformable lunar robot from JAXA, the Japanese space agency; a test module for a solid-state battery from NGK Spark Plug Company; an artificial intelligence flight computer; and 360-degree cameras from Canadensys Aerospace.”
While the result is disappointing to all involved, this does not mark the end of our new space race. In the first one several decades ago, it was all about governments going head to head to get people to the Moon first. But with the rapid advancements being made in the private space industry, it isn’t only governments getting in on the action anymore. As this new space race gets firmly underway, companies will be throwing their hats in the ring right along with countries.
Hopefully, there will be successes to report in the future.
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We landed on the moon in the 60’s
With men…
… and golf clubs
And a pretty cool dune buggy as well. The only things we forgot were burgers, brats, potato salad & a case of Old Milwaukee longnecks.
…and apple pie and Chevrolet!
Potato salad and beer? In space? Oy vey.
What?!!
Are you saying that the Apollo landings were real?
I read on the interwebs that the landing on the moon was a hoax.
😉
You don’t think all our CGI technology came from inventors, did you?
Pfft. It was stolen from the aliens we have in Area 51. They used it to fake the moon landings, then slowly released it to the world for movies and games and such.
The aliens are not in Area 51 anymore. They’re in the White House now!
Jeesh… have you seen the video going around Twitter of “Biden*” scratching his neck?
Also, I do hope this leads to better attempts (by everyone – except maybe China) and we can start to expand.
That should have been a comment unto itself, not in reply to the above. 🙁
The landings were real.
The moon is a hoax.
It’s the sun in disguise.
Ask Chelsea Handler.
It’s an alien base, it rotates to stay on the dark side.
My take on the moon landings being a hoax is this. Watergate there were less than 20 people involved and they could not keep it secret. So for the moon landings there would be a good portion of NASA, lots of the news networks, all the radar operators around the world, a lot of militaries around the world. So potentially thousands of people and about half of them, Russians, Chinese, and Cubans, flat out hated us at the time and would love nothing more than to prove us a fake. And yet none of those people have come forward with any proof it was faked. Just way too many people involved to keep a secret that big.
And, just look at us now!
I’d rather not.
At least it was a private organization, although given the way Japan’s economy works I expect there was no small amount of government money involved.
The space race of the 1960’s was a military project. It was about owning the ultimate high ground, and gunboat diplomacy to show the rest of the world that the US had the technological and military might to outdo the Soviet Union. It wasn’t for science, or exploration, or because people watched too damn much Star Trek as children (had the Soviet Union not launched Sputnik, Star Trek would have been a Western).
I have yet to see anyone make anything like a sensible business case for space exploration, because there isn’t one. It’s a vanity project and a boondoggle.
Asteroid mining?
And asteroid re-location when necessary
As those below have pointed out, you can mine the bottom of the Marianas Trench far cheaper than even the closest asteroid.
Any conceivable technology that would make getting to LEO and around the solar system cheaper and faster also makes getting to remote parts of the Earth and getting to their resources cheaper and faster, you don’t have to bring your own air, and it’s not a seven year round trip.
People’s notions of How Space Works are defined almost entirely by 1950’s and 1960’s science fiction, which were Westerns with a rocketship gloss on them,
Asteroid mining is not even remotely like prospecting for gold in California in 1850 but with a astronaut helmet.
With the exception that it’s a lot easier to build crafts and suits that keep STP inside than to keep deep sea pressures outside.
“ I have yet to see anyone make anything like a sensible business case for space exploration, because there isn’t one. It’s a vanity project and a boondoggle.”
^^^ This ^^^
Many years ago my science teacher said the future was in oceanography since there is an unlimited amount of stuff down there waiting to be explored, discovered, mined, extracted, etc. In a few years we would have underwater cities, we would be mining minerals, harvesting all types of sea food, generating power, etc.
He was off by about 100 years or so.
Other science teachers of the time were positive we’d all be either famined or radiated to death. At least your fool was upbeat.
His point probably was—I can’t be sure now—but I think he concurred with Grizz:
“I have yet to see anyone make anything like a sensible business case for space exploration, because there isn’t oneit would make more sense to explore the ocean than to explore outer space.”
He believed it would be more profitable to explore the ocean than outer space.
“ I have yet to see anyone make anything like a sensible business case for space exploration, because there isn’t one. It’s a vanity project and a boondoggle.”
^^^ This ^^^
I didn’t watch the moon landing and just, plain, didn’t care.
Well, we got Tang as a byproduct.
“The space race of the 1960’s … wasn’t … because people watched too damn much Star Trek as children…”
The space race started in earnest in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik, and the moon landing was in 1969. Star Trek debuted in 1966, not a lot of time for those kids to grow up and contribute. 😁
Yes. That was my point. the 1960’s space race was driven by military priorities, not by a bunch of engineers who watched too much Star Trek as children and subsequently lost the ability to understand why we need Hohmann transfer orbits.
Which is what we’ve got today.
“Now Japan’s engineers are reflecting upon their recent attempt at the first commercial moon landing, which ended in failure.”
After reflecting they said, “Ah so! Too many parts imported from China.”
the residents of the Moon no longer want humans on their property
“Godzilla may have been a contributing factor, since giant space robot was unavailable to secure the mission” said Sailor Moon today, speaking for the JSA.
Not sure why people have been harping on this stuff so much, there is no such thing as failure…only learning opportunities upon which to base future success.
NASA has been doing this stuff for a LOOOONG time and they still have learning opportunities. Private companies getting into the game from a standing start are inevitably going to have a steep learning curve.
More power to them. If we’re ever going to see the fruition of all the science fiction books I’ve been reading all my life, we’ll need more risk-taking of this nature, not less.
I was promised flying cars and Mars colonies by now.
Whenever I get nostalgic over all the lies they fed us, I just tell Siri to play I.G.Y.