The latest victim in the commercial drive to the moon, a private lunar lander from Japan crashed Friday trying a touchdown.
Several hours after contact with the lander was lost, the Tokyo-based business ispace proclaimed their mission to have failed. Flight controllers said they were ending the mission after scrambling to make touch and were only met with silence.
Less than two minutes before the planned lunar landing of the spacecraft with a small rover, communications stopped. Until then, the trip from lunar orbit appeared to be going smoothly.
Taking responsibility for the second lunar strikeout for Ispace, CEO and creator Takeshi Hakamada apologized to all those who helped with the expedition.
The company’s first moonshot ended in a crash landing two years ago, leading to the name “Resilience” for the replacement lander. Along with a Swedish artist’s toy-sized red house for placement on the dusty surface of the moon, resilience brought a rover with a spade to gather lunar dirt. Company executives claimed it was too early to know if the same issue wrecked either flight.
Resilience started in January from Florida on a long, convoluted trip and entered lunar orbit last month. It shared a SpaceX trip with Blue Ghost of Firefly Aerospace, which arrived at the moon faster and became the first commercial entity to land there in March.
A few days after Firefly, another American company, Intuitive Machines arrived at the moon. But the towering, spindly lander face-planted in a crater close to the south pole of the moon and reported dead within hours.
Resilience was headed toward the peak of the moon, a less dangerous area than the dark bottom. The ispace crew selected a level ground free of rocks in Mare Frigoris, or Sea of Cold, a long and narrow area covered in craters and old lava flows over the northern side.
With NASA assistance, he thought of the last moonshot as “just a steppingstone” before a larger lander launching by 2027.
Like other companies, Ispace lacks “infinite funds” and cannot sustain recurrent losses, Jeremy Fix, chief engineer for the U.S. subsidiary, said at a conference last month.
Although business officials stated it’s less than the first mission, which exceeded $100 million, they did not disclose the cost of the current one.
Two other American companies, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Astrobotic Technology, have lunar landings by year’s end in mind. First lunar lander from Astrobotic came falling back through Earth’s atmosphere after missing the moon entirely in 2024.
