A Japanese company’s spacecraft ran out of fuel while attempting a soft moon landing on Tuesday, causing an abrupt end to its five-month journey from the launch pad to the lunar surface.
When the vehicle descended, mission control was in contact with it. After the maneuvers were completed, however, the team lost contact. About a half hour after the event, with a room full of visibly frustrated engineers, Takeshi Hakamada, CEO of ispace, said they should have assumed the landing was unsuccessful, but would continue to investigate the lander’s condition.
Update: April 27, 2023, 9:37 a.m. EST Ispace lost contact with the spacecraft immediately after its scheduled landing. Hours after the event, company officials confirmed that a review of the data indicated their lander had crashed.
After reviewing the flight data, ispace says the data indicates a “hard landing” — aeronautics speak of an accident. During its final approach, the lander was vertical, but the team found that the lander had used up all of its fuel before it could descend. The fuel is needed to fire the thrusters to decelerate during descent. While it was empty, the probe’s speed increased as it moved toward the surface.
The company, ispace, has invited the world to watch along with the Mission Control Center located in Tokyo with a live broadcast of the exciting space event on April 25th. The landing sequence lasted about an hour as the robotic spacecraft executed an engine throttle burn and automatically followed commands to adjust the Hakuto-R’s landing direction and speed for touchdown.
Ispace officials said they are proud of the mission’s achievement and that the flight data during the descent phase will help them prepare for their next two lunar missions.
A daring company is about to attempt a moon landing. You can watch it.
Although it’s been 60 years since the first uncrewed moon landing, it’s still a daunting task, with less than half of the missions succeeding. Unlike Earth, the Moon’s atmosphere is very thin, providing virtually no resistance to slowing the spacecraft as it approaches Earth. Furthermore, there is no GPS system on the moon to help guide the craft to its landing point. Engineers have to make up for these shortcomings from 239,000 miles.
“We can’t simulate all of the moon’s environment on Earth prior to the mission,” Hakamada told Mashable in an interview after the event. “So we have to rely on all the simulations and then a lot of assumptions.”
Takeshi Hakamada, CEO of ispace, said the company will continue to investigate the situation to determine what might have gone wrong.
credit: ispace/youtube screenshot
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This is not the first time that the private sector has attempted to reach the moon. For example, in 2019, an Israeli nonprofit and company collaborated on the $100 million Beresheet mission, which crash-landed on the moon after a steering component failed. The accident will likely scatter some interesting artifacts on the lunar surface in the process.
For an ispace customer, a failed landing meant another dream was indefinitely postponed: the first Arab moon mission. The iSpace probe was supposed to carry the UAE’s Rashid rover(Opens in a new tab) to the Moon, which will explore the Atlas crater. Along with the Emirati rover, a Japanese space program robot was on board.
Hamdan bin Mohammed, Crown Prince of Dubai, said in Arabic on Twitter that the space program will work on a new rover for a new attempt to reach the moon.
And he said, according to Google’s translation of the statement, “We are honored to try to reach a new point in the history of the Emirates, and we are honored to raise our ambitions so that space and its planets and its stars become its ceiling.”
Hakuto-R was the first of many other commercial missions expected to attempt this feat soon, many of which are products of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.(Opens in a new tab). The program was created in 2018 to hire the private sector to help get cargo to the moon. Ispace has not been able to participate directly in the NASA program because it is not an American company, but it is cooperating in one of the contracts led by Draper Technologies of Massachusetts, which is expected to land on the moon in 2025.
These upcoming missions will support the US space agency’s ambitions for the Moon, supplying cargo and experiments to the surface before the arrival of astronauts in 2025 or later. They are also supposed to launch the future lunar economy, referring to the commercial potential of projects on and around the moon.
Ispace executives look on as they await word on whether the Hakuto-R lander will be successful on April 25, 2023.
Credit: ispace
“The environment has changed since I started this company 13 years ago,” said Hakamada. “This is a great market opportunity for a company like us.”
The executive said he was not deterred by the uncertain outcome of the company’s first landing attempt. He said the data will help the company prepare for its next two missions.
He did not regret allowing the general public to watch the attempt in real time.
“We tried to be transparent to the world. And that, we think, (helps us) gain more confidence in our business and our technology,” said Hakamada. “Many people will have the impression that this is real, and this will pave the way for the greater development of the lunar ecosystem.”
Which one will be the first to make the flight intact? The commercial race is on, with more opportunities approaching.
“History can only be made by those who (face) challenges, and challenges would not be possible without taking risks,” said Yoichi Tsuda, a professor of space sciences at the University of Tokyo, during the live broadcast. “Only those who dream can take risks. So ispace teams, you are all excellent dreamers.”
This story was originally published on Tuesday, April 25, 2023. It has been updated to include a lander status report and an interview with CEO Takeshi Hakamada, along with other reactions.