VICE
A Japanese company lost contact with its spacecraft as it was supposed to touch down on the moon, ending its hopes of becoming the first commercial firm to land successfully on the lunar surface.
The Hakuto-R robotic lander, developed by the Japanese firm ispace, was on its final approach to the moon when the company lost touch with the vehicle, at 1:40 am Japan time on Wednesday (or 12:40 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday).
“We have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface,” ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said during a livestream about 20 minutes after the planned landing time.
A soft landing would have been a major success for the company, which aims to eventually profit from space tourism, and Japan, which looks to become a major space power and plans to send Japanese astronauts to the moon by the end of the decade.
No private entities have been able to successfully land on the moon. The first such attempt, by the Israeli non-profit company SpaceIL, failed in 2019 when its Beresheet lander crash-landed on the lunar surface.
ispace has yet to confirm what exactly went wrong with the landing. But the company said the lander likely also crashed on our nearest neighbor in the Solar system. This left space agencies from the U.S., China, and the former Soviet Union as the only entities to have made a controlled landing on the moon. India’s first attempt to pull off a soft landing in 2019 ended in a crash after the lander malfunctioned during its descent.
The landing attempt was the culmination of more than a decade of efforts by ispace, which in 2013 entered a Google competition offering $20 million to whoever landed a robotic probe on the moon first. No one was able to do that before the event’s 2018 deadline, but ispace continued to develop the mission. In December, Hakuto-R was launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida and arrived in lunar orbit on March 20.
The Hakuto-R lander carried a 22-pound rover developed by the United Arab Emirates, the first attempt by any Arab country to explore the moon. It also carried a spherical mini rover developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Japanese toymaker TOMY.
ispace aims to eventually sell trips to the moon and exploit resources on the natural satellite. Despite the setback, ispace CEO Hakamada said the data collected right up to the attempted landing would help inform future missions, which could launch as soon as next year.
The Japanese firm is just one of several private companies exploring a potential market for lunar exploration. At least two U.S. companies are on track to land spacecraft on the moon this year as part of a NASA program.
As far as government efforts are concerned, India, Russia, Japan, and the U.S. have all planned to launch lunar landing missions this summer.
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