Japan startup hopeful ahead of second moon launch

In April 2023, the firm's first spacecraft made an unsalvageable "hard landing", dashing its ambitions to be the first private company to touch down on the Moon.

The Houston-based Intuitive Machines accomplished that feat last year with an uncrewed craft that landed at the wrong angle but was able to complete tests and send photos.

With another mission scheduled to launch next week, ispace wants to win its place in space history at a booming time for missions to the Moon from both governments and private companies.

"We at ispace were disappointed in the failure of Mission 1," ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada told reporters.

"But that's why we hope to send a message to people across Japan that it's important to challenge ourselves again, after enduring the failure and learning from it."

"We will make this Mission 2 a success," he said.

Its new lander, called Resilience, will blast off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on January 15, along with another lunar lander built by US company Firefly Aerospace.

If Resilience lands successfully, it will deploy a micro rover and five other payloads from corporate partners.

These include an experiment by Takasago Thermal Engineering, which wants to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas with a view to using hydrogen as satellite and spacecraft fuel.

- Rideshare -

Firefly's Blue Ghost lander will arrive at the Moon after travelling 45 days, followed by ispace's Resilience, which the Japanese company hopes will land on the Earth's satellite at the end of May, or in June.

For the programme, officially named Hakuto-R Mission 2, ispace chose to cut down on costs by arranging the first private-sector rocket rideshare, Hakamada said.

Only five nations have soft-landed spacecraft on the Moon: the Soviet Union, the United States, China, India and, most recently, Japan.

Many companies are vying to offer cheaper and more frequent space exploration opportunities than governments.

Space One, another Japanese startup, is trying to become Japan's first company to put a satellite into orbit -- with some difficulty so far.

Last month, Space One's solid-fuel Kairos rocket blasted off from a private launchpad in western Japan but was later seen spiralling downwards in the distance.

That was the second launch attempt by Space One after an initial try in March last year ended in a mid-air explosion.

Meanwhile Toyota, the world's top-selling carmaker, announced this week it would invest seven billion yen ($44 million) in Japanese rocket startup Interstellar Technologies.

"The global demand for small satellite launches has surged nearly 20-fold, from 141 launches in 2016 to 2,860 in 2023," driven by private space businesses, national security concerns and technological development, Interstellar said.