A private lunar lander from Japan fell silent while descending to the moon with a mini rover Friday and its fate was unknown.
The Tokyo-based company ispace reported that its lander successfully exited lunar orbit, proceeding as planned, with initial indications showing everything was going smoothly. However, there was no immediate confirmation about the landing’s success after the hourlong descent.
As anticipation grew, the company’s live coverage of the landing attempt suddenly stopped. “We haven’t been able to confirm,” a Japanese-speaking commentator explained, though Mission Control remains determined to reestablish communication with the lander.
This effort follows the company’s first lunar mission attempt two years prior, which ended in a crash, inspiring the naming of its successor lander as Resilience. Resilience was equipped with a rover designed to collect lunar soil, and included a toy-size red house from a Swedish artist, meant to be placed on the moon’s surface.
Long the province of governments, the moon became a target of private outfits in 2019, with more flops than wins along the way.
Launched in January from Florida on a long, roundabout journey, Resilience entered lunar orbit last month. It shared a SpaceX ride with Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, which reached the moon faster and became the first private entity to successfully land there in March.
Another U.S. company, Intuitive Machines, arrived at the moon a few days after Firefly. But the tall, spindly lander face-planted in a crater near the moon’s south pole and was declared dead within hours.
Resilience was targeting the top of the moon, a less forbidding place than the shadowy bottom. The ispace team chose a flat area with few boulders in Mare Frigoris or Sea of Cold, a long and narrow region full of craters and ancient lava flows that stretches across the near side’s northern tier.
Plans had called for the 7.5-foot (2.3-meter) Resilience to beam back pictures within hours and for the lander to lower the piggybacking rover onto the lunar surface this weekend.
Made of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic with four wheels, ispace’s European-built rover — named Tenacious — sported a high-definition camera to scout out the area and a shovel to scoop up some lunar dirt for NASA.
The rover, weighing just 11 pounds (5 kilograms), was going to stick close to the lander, going in circles at a speed of less than one inch (a couple centimeters) per second. It was capable of venturing up to two-thirds of a mile (1 kilometer) from the lander and should be operational throughout the two-week mission, the period of daylight.
Besides science and tech experiments, there was an artistic touch.
The rover held a tiny, Swedish-style red cottage with white trim and a green door, dubbed the Moonhouse by creator Mikael Genberg, for placement on the lunar surface.
Takeshi Hakamada, CEO and founder of ispace, considered the latest moonshot “merely a steppingstone,” with its next, much bigger lander launching by 2027 with NASA involvement, and even more to follow.
Minutes before the attempted landing, Hakamada assured everyone that ispace had learned from its first failed mission. “Engineers did everything they possibly could” to ensure success this time, he said.
Chief financial officer Jumpei Nozaki promised to continue the lunar quest regardless of the outcome.
Ispace, like other businesses, does not have “infinite funds” and cannot afford repeated failures, Jeremy Fix, chief engineer for ispace’s U.S. subsidiary, said at a conference last month.
While not divulging the cost of the current mission, company officials said it’s less than the first one which exceeded $100 million.
Two other U.S. companies are aiming for moon landings by year’s end: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Astrobotic Technology. Astrobotic’s first lunar lander missed the moon altogether in 2024 and came crashing back through Earth’s atmosphere.
For decades, governments competed to get to the moon. Only five countries have pulled off successful robotic lunar landings: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan. Of those, only the U.S. has landed people on the moon: 12 NASA astronauts from 1969 through 1972.
NASA expects to send four astronauts around the moon next year. That would be followed a year or more later by the first lunar landing by a crew in more than a half-century, with SpaceX’s Starship providing the lift from lunar orbit all the way down to the surface. China also has moon landing plans for its own astronauts by 2030.
