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NASA is well on its way to return to the Moon later this decade, but getting to Earth’s satellite isn’t much easier than it was 50 years ago. The first private spacecraft was supposed to land on the Moon on Tuesday, courtesy of Japan-based ispace. However, the firm now believes the Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) lander has crashed.
Hakuto-R was launched in December of last year with myriad other payloads aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket—the same one that launched NASA’s Lunar Flashlight mission. The M1 was supposed to demonstrate ispace’s low-cost lunar cargo service. Instead, the inaugural mission is just a reminder of how difficult it is to get where you’re going in space.
The lander was in working order prior to its descent as it orbited 15 miles (25 kilometers) above the surface. Everything went as planned as the craft near the surface. Mission control lost contact with the lander several minutes before touchdown, which was expected. The robotic lander was supposed to cut its engines and drift down for a soft landing, at which time it would reestablish contact with Earth. However, ispace reports it was unable to reconnect and therefore assumes the lander has been lost.
This is not the first time a private lunar lander has come close to making history. The Beresheet lander from Israel-based SpaceIL also crashed on the Moon as it attempted to land in 2019. SpaceIL and ispace both have a long history of planning for lunar landings, too. Both companies participated in the Google-backed Lunar X Prize, which offered $20 million to the first commercial lander to reach the Moon’s surface intact. No one won the contest, and here we are years later still with no privately funded lunar landers.
Hakuto-R is less than two meters tall and has a dry mass of 340 kilograms (1,000 kg with fuel). Its payload capacity to the Moon is just 30 kg (about 66 pounds), but these small, low-cost lunar landers are seen as essential to future operations on and around the Moon. When it vanished, Hakuto-R was carrying several experiments to the Moon, including a small lunar rover from the United Arab Emirates and the Japanese Lunar Excursion Vehicle, a JAXA rover with two hemispherical wheels.
The company seems undeterred by the last-minute loss. “We acquired flight data during the landing phase,” said ispace founder Takeshi Hakamada, which he called a “great achievement” for future space missions. Ispace will try again, but at this point, the Starship HLS might end up being the first private lunar lander.
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