Japan’s Bid to Make First Commercial Moon Landing Ends in Failure

LI 005 Japan Lander

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.

Tags: Japan, Space

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