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Tense ispace Mission Control Center workers await word if their second lunar lander made it to the Moon.
The death toll for spacecraft attempting soft landings on the Moon notched up another victim last week when Japan’s ispace failed in its second bid to touch down on the lunar surface.
After a relatively slow but smooth 4 1/2-month journey, ispace’s Resilience lander homed in on its intended landing site at Mare Frigoris, a basaltic plain about 560 mi. from the Moon’s north pole.
The spacecraft carried six payloads, including an 11-lb. microrover named Tenacious, built by iSpace’s Luxembourg division. Among the rover’s tasks were to collect a sample of lunar regolith and symbolically transfer ownership to NASA to test the evolving legal and regulatory framework in support of commercial lunar development.
Also aboard Resilience: an electrolyzer to demonstrate technologies in development to produce oxygen and hydrogen from lunar water; an algae-growth experiment to demonstrate a potential food source; a deep-space radiation probe; a work of art called “Moonhouse,” flying as part of a cultural program; and a commemorative plate that included an inscription from the Japanese manga and science fiction series Gundam.
Engineers at ispace’s Mission Control Center in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, transmitted commands to Resilience to execute the landing sequence at 3:13 a.m. local time June 6. The lander descended from a 62-mi.-high lunar orbit to about 12 mi. above the surface, then fired its braking engine to shed speed.
Flight controllers confirmed Resilience was orientated vertically for the imminent touchdown, but then lost telemetry. “No data indicating a successful landing was received, even after the scheduled landing time had passed,” ispace reported in a mission status update.
An investigation is underway, but the initial assessment shows the spacecraft’s laser rangefinder, used to measure the distance to the lunar surface, “experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values,” ispace said. “As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing. Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface.”
Engineers tried sending a command to reboot the lander, but were unable to communicate with the vehicle, bringing a quick end to the Hakuto-R campaign. “Our top priority is to swiftly analyze the telemetry data we have obtained thus far and work diligently to identify the cause,” ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada said in a statement.
Resilience was the third spacecraft this year to attempt a lunar landing, only one of which was successful. Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander touched down March 2 and went on to complete a 14-day mission. Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C Athena spacecraft reached the Moon’s surface March 6, but ended up sideways and unable to aim its solar panels at the Sun to generate power.
In February 2024, Intuitive Machine’s Odysseus spacecraft became the first U.S. vehicle to make a soft landing on the Moon since NASA’s final Apollo program mission in 1972. However, Odysseus did not stick that landing either.
Attempts by Israel’s Beresheet lander in 2019 and by ispace’s Hakuto-R Mission 1 in 2023 likewise were unsuccessful. Engineers at ispace later determined a computer error caused the spacecraft to hover 3 mi. above the surface until it ran out of fuel and crashed.
Japan last year became the fifth country to make a soft landing on the Moon after the former Soviet Union, the U.S., China and India. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s SLIM spacecraft, however, toppled over at touchdown.
Closer to home, SpaceX is on track to launch the 500th rocket in its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy program. Last week also marked the first time a Falcon 9 upper-stage was intentionally deorbited from a geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO), where it had deposited the SiriusXM-10 satellite after launch June 7.
“While we routinely do controlled deorbits for LEO [low Earth orbit] stages … deorbiting from GTO is extremely difficult due to the high energy needed to alter the orbit, making this a rare and remarkable first for us,” Jon Edwards, vice president of Falcon and Dragon at SpaceX, wrote on X.
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