Japan’s ispace second lunar lander attempt fails after contact lost

TOKYO - Tokyo-based ispace said it will not be able to restore contact with its lunar lander, a blow to Japan’s burgeoning commercial space industry. 

Its Resilience lander was expected to touch down on the moon at 4am (3am Singapore time) on June 6, but the company ended its live stream of the landing attempt – watched by more than 17,000 people – after losing contact. The company’s stock price was awash with sell orders at the Tokyo market open.

“There is a high possibility the lander made a hard landing on the moon,” founder and chief executive Takeshi Hakamada said at a press conference, adding that the lander may not have had time to adequately decelerate. “What’s important is to use what we learned in our next steps.”

The mission follows a failed attempt in 2023 when a programming error led to a crash of the spacecraft. If the attempt had succeeded, ispace would have been the first non-US company to park a spacecraft safely on the moon. Texas-based rivals Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace have already done so, as countries race to explore the moon.

The Japanese lander launched into space aboard one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets in January. The rocket also launched a lander from Firefly that touched down on the lunar surface in March.

Resilience was expected to dispatch its rover, named Tenacious, which is equipped with a high-definition camera and a shovel to collect lunar regolith and transmit data back to the lander. Ispace signed a contract in 2020 with Nasa to provide the US agency with regolith collected on the moon’s surface.

Aboard the lander are customer payloads with varying purposes, including a commemorative plate from Bandai Namco Research Institute – an affiliate of the entertainment company behind game brands like Pac-Man and Gundam – and experimental equipment such as a device to extract hydrogen from water.

ispace plans to send its landers more frequently to the moon starting in 2027, with an aim to transport payloads two or three times a year, according to Mr Hakamada. The plan is based on his belief that humans could start making a living on the moon as early as the 2040s.

Mr Hakamada said in an interview before the landing attempt that Japan will lose out on opportunities to seek fresh growth if it refuses to accept failures as a course of nature.

“It would be a huge loss for our society if failures only discourage bold attempts and trials,” he said. BLOOMBERG