The privately funded explorer carried by the SpaceX rocket aims to land in Atlas Crater in April.
A Japanese space startup has launched its own private moon landing aboard a SpaceX rocket, marking a significant step toward what would be a historic first for both the nation and a private company.
Tokyo-based ispace Inc’s HAKUTO-R mission lifted off without incident from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Sunday after two delays caused by inspections of its SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The company designed its craft to use minimal fuel to save money and leave more room for cargo.
It is taking a slow, low-energy path to the moon, flying within 1.6 million km (one million miles) of Earth before turning back and making a planned landing in late April.
By contrast, NASA’s Orion crew capsule with test dummies took five days to reach the moon last month. The lunar flyby mission is expected to end Sunday with a splash in the Pacific Ocean.
ispace HAKUTO-R Mission 1 deployment confirmed pic.twitter.com/9R3Uw2qceS
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 11, 2022
Pointing at the Atlas Crater
The ispace spacecraft aims to put a small NASA satellite into lunar orbit to search for water deposits before landing in Atlas Crater, which is located in the northeastern section of the near side of the moon and measures more than 87 km (54 miles) wide and a little more. 2 km (1.2 miles) deep.
The M1 lander will deploy two robotic rovers, an orange-sized two-wheeled device from the Japanese space agency JAXA and a four-wheeled unit made by the United Arab Emirates, known as the Rashid Explorer, after the family patriarch royal dubai
It will also carry an experimental solid-state battery manufactured by NGK Spark Plug Co, a spark plug company based in Japan.
The national space agencies of the United States, Russia and China have achieved soft landings on Earth’s nearest neighbor over the past half-century, but Japan does not have, or has, any private companies.
The successful mission would also represent a milestone in space cooperation between Japan and the US at a time when China is increasingly competitive and trips on Russian rockets are no longer available in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine .
The company expects the HAKUTO-R project, whose name refers to the white rabbit that Japanese folklore suggests lives on the moon, to be the first of many government and commercial payload deliveries.
It has a contract with NASA to transport payloads to the Moon starting in 2025 and aims to build a permanently staffed lunar colony by 2040.
The ispace lander will target Atlas Crater on the northeastern section of the moon’s near side [File: Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters]
‘The Dawn of the Lunar Economy’
Sunday also marked the 50th anniversary of the last lunar landing by astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of Apollo 17 on December 11, 1972.
Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of ispace, said NASA’s Apollo moon photos are about the “excitement of technology.”
Now, he noted on SpaceX’s launch webcast, “it’s the thrill of the business.”
“This is the dawn of the lunar economy… Let’s go to the moon,” Hakamada said.
The liftoff was originally scheduled for two weeks ago, but SpaceX delayed it for additional rocket checks.
Eight minutes after launch, the recycled first-stage booster landed back at Cape Canaveral under a nearly full moon, the twin sonic booms echoing through the night.
Founded in 2010, ispace was among the finalists in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition that required a successful moon landing in 2018. The lunar rover built by ispace was never launched.
Another finalist, an Israeli non-profit organization called SpaceIL, managed to reach the moon in 2019. But instead of landing smoothly, the Beresheet spacecraft crashed into the moon and was destroyed.