The dream of the Japanese start-up company Ispace to be the first private company to use a lunar probe on the moon has burst for the time being. The moon lander “Hakuto-R” probably crashed during a “hard landing”, said Ispace founder Takeshi Hakamada on Wednesday. The radio contact with the probe had previously been broken off. However, Ispace does not want to give up, but instead wants to start further moon missions after evaluating the failed moon landing.
At first it had seemed as if everything was going according to plan. On Tuesday at around 5:40 p.m. CEST, the two-by-eight-meter probe began its landing approach about a hundred kilometers above the moon, only to touch down about an hour later. The complicated landing maneuver apparently failed, however, and Ispace lost radio contact with its probe. The engineers are now investigating what exactly went wrong.
Ispace boss Hakamada was not discouraged. Even if this mission apparently failed, “it has proven to be very important in view of the large amount of data and experience gained,” explained the founder of the start-up company, which currently has around 200 employees. “The important thing is to use the knowledge and use these teachings for the second mission and the ones that follow.”
However, Ispace could be overtaken by US firms Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines. For their part, they are working to put a probe on the moon this year.
The 340-kilogram Ispace lunar probe broke up in December. A rocket from the private US space company SpaceX had brought them into space from Cape Canaveral. Last month “Hakuto-R” reached the orbit of the moon. It transported several lunar vehicles, including an eight-centimetre-tall model that the Japanese space agency built with toymaker Takara Tomy.
The probe should also put the United Arab Emirates’ Rashid rover on the moon. Despite the failure, the Emirates Space Center thanked Ispace for working “tirelessly” for the mission’s success.
A success of the mission had already been considered in advance as by no means certain. In April 2019, the Israeli non-profit organization SpaceIL had already failed with a similar attempt. Their probe smashed on the surface of the moon. The same happened in 2019 with the Indian lunar probe “Vikram”. So far, only the USA, Russia and China have succeeded in bringing robots to the earth’s satellite, which is around 400,000 kilometers away.
In recent years, international interest in lunar missions has increased again. Japan and the US announced last year that they would work together to put a Japanese astronaut on the moon by the end of the decade.
Ispace wants to extend the “sphere of human life to outer space”. The company estimates that by 2040 there will already be around a thousand people living on the moon and around 10,000 people could travel there every year.
