A private company from Japan aiming to become the first non-government organization to land a spacecraft on the moon ran into issues at the last minute. A Japanese private company, ispace, blasted a rocket to the moon and its lunar lander was set to touch down today, April 25, at 12:40 PM ET, but flight controllers lost communication just “moments” before it should have landed.
According to The Associated Press, the lunar lander–named Hakuto, the Japanese word for white rabbit–was just 33 feet away from the Moon’s surface when flight controllers lost contact. The spacecraft was moving at a speed of about 16 mph.
“We have to assume that we did not complete the landing on the lunar surface,” ispace founder Takeshi Hakamada is reported to have said during a webcast of the attempted landing.
This was going to be the world’s first successful lunar landing from a private company’s own spaceship. In 2019, lunar landers from private companies in India and Israel made it close to the moon but wrecked on impact. The United States was the first government to ever land on the moon, back in July 1969. China and Russia have landed craft on the moon, but never people.
I just want to give ispace founder Takeshi Hakamada a hug right now. They lost communications with Hakuto-R just before it was scheduled to touch down. “We have to assume that we did not complete the landing on the lunar surface.” pic.twitter.com/F47auOqJdb
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) April 25, 2023
The US is trying to get back to the moon with its new Artemis space program. This is part of a wider effort to create a “long-term, sustainable lunar presence” to explore the lunar surface. After that, NASA intends to send an astronaut to Mars.
Artemis II (November 2024) will take a crew of human astronauts to the Moon, but it won’t be until 2025’s Artemis III–if all goes to plan–that humans will land on the moon to conduct further research.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as part of a $3 billion contract with the US government, just launched its first test flight for the world’s largest rocket and spacecraft, Starship. The test flight achieved some of SpaceX’s goals and was heralded as a success by NASA, but minutes after launch, it began to spin out of control. SpaceX pressed a button and blew it up.
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