Japanese Lunar Technology Corporation com. ispace The company will make its second attempt to land on the moon in the fourth quarter of 2024, just about two years after launching its first failed mission, executives said Thursday.
ispace launched the first lunar landing mission aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 in December 2022. The lander, called Hakuto-R, spent more than 100 days on a journey to the moon. Success seemed imminent—until a problem with the altimeter malfunctioned, causing the descent software to misjudge the distance to the surface. Eventually, the lander ran out of fuel and crashed into the lunar surface just moments before it was supposed to make contact.
Despite the setback, ispace clearly didn’t cave: The company named its second lander “Resilience,” a name that CEO Takeshi Hakamada said at a press conference was meant to represent “strength, bounce ability, and quality of movement.” Forward without defeat.
Although the first mission ended in disaster, the company was able to collect a lot of information about the subsystem performance, hardware, communications and orbital maneuvering. In some ways, something going wrong moments before landing is the best case of all possible worst-case scenarios: it means everything else went well.
For this reason, the second lander will have much of the same hardware as the first, ispace executive vice president of engineering Yoshitsugu Hitachi said. Like the first lander, Resilience measures 2.5 x 2.3 meters and weighs 340 kilograms without fuel. The second mission will also take the same route to the Moon via a so-called “low-energy transfer orbit,” which will take months to complete.
“The Mission 1 landing failure analysis has clearly identified the causes and areas for improvement, so the main focus of Mission 2 will be on reviewing and improving the verification process already implemented,” Hitachi said. “We are confident of the successful landing of the Resilience lander on Mission 2 and believe we can safely execute a soft landing and begin subsequent operations on the Moon.”
The biggest difference between Mission 1 and Mission 2 will be the payload: For Mission 2, ispace developed a very small lunar rover that will explore the landing site and collect regolith samples as part of a NASA contract. Julien Lamy, managing director of ispace Europe, said the vehicle was designed to be “as small as possible, as lightweight as possible.” The vehicle, which weighs only five kilograms, has its own cameras, communications equipment and a payload capacity of one kilogram. In addition to the rover, the Resilience lander will carry four commercial payloads.
ispace said it expects to complete assembly of the lander by spring 2024, then begin environmental testing, which typically takes a few months. From there, the lander will head to Florida for launch on a Falcon 9 rocket.
There is no doubt that ispace will continue to collect useful data from these missions. The company, which is headquartered in Tokyo with offices in Luxembourg and Denver, is working on a third mission currently scheduled for 2026.