A Japanese space exploration firm, ispace, lost contact with its lander during an attempted lunar landing on Tuesday. The landing was part of a mission to lay the groundwork for a potential lunar colony by 2040. The Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in December 2022, and was carrying several rovers, including the United Arab Emirates’ “Rashid.”
“We have not confirmed communication with the lander,” said a company official approximately 25 minutes after the planned landing time. “We have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface,” he added.
Only the United States, China, and the former Soviet Union have successfully soft-landed spacecraft on the moon, and recent attempts by India and Israeli firm SpaceIL have ended in failure. The M1 is 2.3 meters tall and was moving at nearly 6,000 kilometers per hour before attempting to land. It was scheduled to land around 1:40 pm Japan time (1650 UTC/GMT) and was in the moon’s orbit traveling at 100 kilometers per hour.
Before attempting the landing, the M1 was required to adjust its speed and altitude to make a soft landing on the moon. The company’s Chief Technology Officer, Ryo Ujiie, compared slowing down the lander’s speed to “stepping on the brakes on a running bicycle at the edge of a ski jumping hill.”
Ispace’s founder and CEO, Takeshi Hakamada, believes that this mission was crucial for laying the foundation of a future lunar colony. “The stage is set. I am looking forward to witnessing this historic day, marking the beginning of a new era of commercial lunar missions,” Hakamada said. The firm is set to work with US space lab Draper to bring NASA payloads to the moon starting in 2025.
The company’s next mission is scheduled for 2024, during which it plans to deploy its own rover. Tokyo aims to send Japanese astronauts to the moon by the late 2030s. Last month, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)’s new medium-lift H3 rocket was forced to self-destruct after it reached space. In October, JAXA’s solid-fuel Epsilon rocket failed after launch.
Ispace’s CEO, however, remains optimistic about the future of space exploration. “What we have accomplished so far is already a great achievement, and we are already applying lessons learned from this flight to our future missions,” he said. The company believes that the Moon will support a population of 1,000 people by 2040, with 10,000 more people able to visit each year.
