A private space firm from Japan likely did not stick its moon landing on Thursday, which would make this the second failed attempt to get to the lunar surface for the company in the past two years.
The mission, dubbed Hakuto-R by the company ispace, tried to touch down around 3:15 p.m. ET on June 5 after a long 4.5-month meandering journey to save on fuel. But the team lost communication with the lander — a foreboding sign that something probably went wrong.
Ispace invited the public to watch alongside its Tokyo-based mission control, where it was already the early morning hours of June 6. The landing sequence lasted about an hour as the robotic spacecraft Resilience performed a braking engine burn and followed automated commands to adjust the lander's orientation and speed.
The livestream showed a stoic crowd of engineers piled into the mission control room, staring intensely at their consoles for updated information on the spacecraft's status.
"Telemetry figures are not coming," one of the broadcast commentators said through an English interpreter.
After minutes of waiting, the broadcast ended with ispace spokespeople saying they would try to have answers at a news conference later in the day.
The Resilience lander was supposed to deliver a tiny European rover, dubbed Tenacious, to the surface. The robot is smaller than a toddler's Big Wheel and armed with a scoop for collecting soil. If everything had gone as planned, it could have been the first European spacecraft to drive on the moon.
The lander was also carrying a miniature replica of a traditional Swedish house. The red dollhouse, called the Moonhouse, would have been placed on the surface, for no other purpose than art.
Resilience was targeting a northern location, a relatively easier site than the dark, heavily cratered south pole, where many other spacefaring countries and companies want to go. The area is known as Mare Frigoris, aka the "Sea of Cold," which stretches across the near side's top.
Landing on the moon remains onerous — demonstrated by numerous flopped landings. Though Firefly Aerospace succeeded in landing in March, another U.S. company, Intuitive Machines, didn't fare as well, ending up on its side in a crater less than a week later.
The difficulty arises from the lunar exosphere, which provides virtually no drag to slow a spacecraft down as it approaches the ground. What's more, there are no GPS systems on the moon to help guide a craft to its landing spot. Engineers have to compensate for those challenges from 239,000 miles away.
Ispace's first Hakuto-R lander crashed in April 2023 because it ran out of fuel on the way down, unable to control its landing. It was unclear immediately after the second attempt on Thursday if the lander had faced the same fate.
The mission is just one of many other commercial missions expected to attempt this feat, most of which are an outgrowth of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program. The program was established in 2018 to recruit the private sector to help deliver cargo to the moon. Ispace couldn't directly participate in the NASA program because it isn't an American company, but it is collaborating on one of the contracts led by Draper Technologies in Massachusetts, expected to land on the moon in 2025.
These upcoming missions will support the U.S. space agency's lunar ambitions, shipping supplies and experiments to the surface ahead of astronauts' arrival in 2027 or later. They're also supposed to kickstart a future cislunar economy, the perceived market opportunity for business ventures on and around the moon.
"We need to never quit the lunar quest," a commentator's interpreter said.
