The chances of them all making it down in one functional piece seem remarkably slim. Five entities are set to try and land spacecraft on the Moon be: the two American companies, the Japanese space agency, the Indian space agency (its second attempt) and the Russian space agency. The Soviet Union did so in the 1960s the Indian space agency and an Israeli mission did so in 2019. History shows that most teams trying to land on the Moon fail on their first attempt. The loss of HAKUTO-R Mission 1 can but add to the next missions’ jitters.

Peregrine 1, the first Astrobotic mission, will carry a set of five micro-rovers developed by Mexico’s space agency. Rashid, a rover developed by the UAE’s space program, was a paying passenger on HAKUTO-R Mission 1. There are countries which would like to do research on the Moon that have no lunar spacecraft of their own and do not relish the hassle of developing them. A third will use ispace’s 2025 lander.Īmerica is not the only customer. The first two such landers, built by Astrobotic of Pittsburgh and Intuitive Machines of Houston, are set to be launched this summer. America’s space agency, NASA, is buying delivery-to-the-Moon services from a range of startups and joint ventures. Companies did not attempt them because there was no commercial opportunity. All previous landings have been by national space agencies.

The company is at work on a second HAKUTO-R spacecraft for launch next year, and it is providing a Moon lander of a different design as part of a team working on a mission for 2025.Īs the listing and the orderbook bear witness, the biggest difference between ispace and the entities that have landed on the Moon before is that it is a private company. And though the company’s share price dropped by 20% on the day after the crash, at the end of the day it was still comfortably above the level at which it listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market just a couple of weeks ago. What is more, the mission was insured (one of various ways in which it was the first of a kind), though whether the crash falls within the scope of the policy has not been announced. Managing to get to within a few kilometres of the Moon’s surface may sound like something of a pyrrhic victory, but it shows that most of the company’s engineering works. Quite why the spacecraft ran out of fuel a bit before the finish line is not clear. On the final journey from orbit to surface, though, its engine cut out a little too early and it plummeted to the surface. The spacecraft, launched last December, had performed nicely as it took a slow, energy efficient trajectory out to the Moon, inserted itself into orbit, and adjusted that orbit until it was circling at 100km just as intended.

The latest pupils to walk out of one of her tests with only a new crater to show for it are the team at ispace, a Japanese company, which tried, and failed, to land HAKUTO-R Mission 1 on the edge of Mare Frigoris on April 25th.

The moon is a harsh mistress book