It was night in Tokyo when the Hakuto-R lander of the Japanese company ispace inc. attempted the Moon landing. Shortly before the touchdown, the team at the mission control center lost contact with Hakuto-R, and the last phase of the maneuver was followed only through a simulation based on the braking programming. After more than half an hour of trying to reconnect with the lander, company founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada had to admit that he had to assume that the Moon landing could not be completed.
Launched on December 11, 2022, atop a Falcon 9 rocket, the Hakuto-R lander was the first Moon landing attempt by a private company on a commercial space mission. In recent years, ispace participated in the Google Lunar X PRIZE competition and then continued its project to offer cargo transport services to the Moon in what could be a new market if NASA’s Artemis program opens a new frontier for good.
After a journey that lasted more than five months, the Hakuto-R lander was ready for the Moon landing and until the last minute, everything seemed to go according to plan. Hakuto-R was braking, the crucial part of the maneuver taking it towards the Moon soil. It must be said that the transmitted images weren’t taken by cameras mounted on the lander but were CGI reconstructions. Eventually, after contact was lost, the images were complete simulations.
The ispace team at the mission control center attempted to restore contact with the Hakuto-R lander for over half an hour after the Moon landing moment but without success. At that point, an understandably distraught Takeshi Hakamada, ispace founder and CEO, announced that he had to assume the Moon landing could not be completed. However, he had words of praise for the company’s employees and thanked them together with the company’s sponsors.
A few hours later, in a new press release, the company officially acknowledged the impossibility of obtaining the desired result and that there’s a high probability that Hakuto-R is crash landed. A preliminary analysis of the telemetry data indicates that the propellant level was at a minimum threshold and subsequently Hakuto-R’s descent speed increased. All this will have to be checked carefully but it seems that Hakuto-R ran out of propellant before touching the ground and consequently the braking was interrupted causing its crash landing on the Moon.
Success in Moon landings is still difficult to achieve, and that’s proved by the fact that ispace joins the Indian space agency ISRO and the Israeli non-profit team SpaceIL whose landers Vikram and Beresheet met the same fate in 2019. The consequences for ispace are to be seen, as it’s a company that wants to sell certain services and therefore has to prove that it can successfully complete a difficult job.
