Ispace Inc., a Japanese startup, announced on Tuesday that its attempt to make the first private moon landing had failed. The company lost contact with its Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) lander, indicating that it had most likely crashed on the lunar surface. According to ispace, the final pings of data in the moments before the planned touchdown showed the lander's speed rapidly increasing, leading engineers at mission control in Tokyo to determine that a successful landing was "not achievable".
Takeshi Hakamada, founder and Chief Executive of ispace, said on a company live stream shortly after communication from the spacecraft ceased that "We lost communication, so we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface". A lunar landing would have been a significant achievement for a private firm. Only the United States, the former Soviet Union, and China have soft-landed spacecraft on the moon, with attempts in recent years by India and a private Israeli company ending in failure.
The Japanese firm has stated that it "determined that there is a high probability that the lander eventually made a hard landing." Despite this setback, ispace said that it did not expect an immediate impact on its earnings forecast. The startup delivers payloads such as rovers to the moon and sells related data. It does not expect to book any profit until around 2025.
The M1 lander, which was launched four months ago from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a SpaceX rocket, appeared set to autonomously touch down at about 12:40 p.m. Eastern time (1640 GMT Tuesday), with an animation based on live telemetry data showing it coming as close as 90 meters (295 feet) from the lunar surface. By the expected touchdown time, mission control had lost contact with the lander, and engineers appeared anxious over the live stream as they awaited signal confirmation of its fate, which never came.
Hakamada said that the lander completed eight out of 10 mission objectives in space that will provide valuable data for the next landing attempt in 2024. The lander was aiming for a landing site at the edge of Mare Frigoris in the moon's northern hemisphere, where it would have deployed a two-wheeled, baseball-sized rover developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Tomy Co. Ltd., and Sony Group Corp. It also planned to deploy a four-wheeled rover dubbed Rashid from the United Arab Emirates. The lander was also carrying an experimental solid-state battery made by Niterra Co. Ltd. among other devices to gauge their performance on the moon.