A Tokyo company is aiming for the Moon with its own private lander, blasting off on Sunday on top of a SpaceX rocket with the United Arab Emirates’ first lunar rover and a toylike robot from Japan that is designed to roll around in the grey dust.
It will take nearly five months for the lander and its experiments to reach the Moon.
The company ispace designed its craft to use minimal fuel, to save money and leave more room for cargo, so it is taking a slow, low-energy path, flying one million miles (1.6 million kilometres) from Earth before looping back and intersecting with the Moon by the end of April.
By contrast, Nasa’s Orion crew capsule with test dummies took five days to reach the Moon last month. The lunar flyby mission ends on Sunday with a Pacific splashdown.
The ispace lander will aim for the Atlas crater in the north-eastern section of the Moon’s near side, more than 50 miles (87km) across and just over a mile (2km) deep. With its four legs extended, the lander is more than 7ft (2.3m) tall.
With a science satellite already around Mars, the UAE also wants to explore the Moon. Its rover, named Rashid after Dubai’s royal family, weighs just 22lb (10kg) and will operate on the surface for about 10 days, like everything else on the mission.
In addition, the lander is carrying an orange-sized sphere from the Japanese Space Agency that will transform into a wheeled robot on the Moon.
Also flying are a solid state battery from a Japanese-based spark plug company; an Ottawa, Ontario, company’s flight computer with artificial intelligence for identifying geologic features seen by the UAE rover; and 360-degree cameras from a Toronto-area company.
Hitching a ride on the rocket is a small Nasa laser experiment that will fly to the Moon on its own to hunt for ice in the permanently shadowed craters of the lunar south pole.
The ispace mission is called Hakuto, Japanese for white rabbit. In Asian folklore, a white rabbit is said to live on the Moon. A second lunar landing by the private company is planned for 2024 and a third in 2025.
Founded in 2010, ispace was among the finalists in the Google Lunar X Prize competition requiring a successful landing on the Moon by 2018. The lunar rover built by ispace never launched.
Another finalist, an Israeli non-profit called SpaceIL, managed to reach the Moon in 2019. But instead of landing gently, the spacecraft Beresheet slammed into the Moon and was destroyed.
With Sunday’s pre-dawn launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, ispace is now on its way to becoming one of the first private entities to attempt a Moon landing.
Although not launching until early next year, lunar landers built by Pittsburgh’s Astrobotic Technology and Houston’s Intuitive Machines may beat ispace to the Moon thanks to shorter cruise times.
Only Russia, the US and China have achieved so-called “soft landings” on the Moon, beginning with the former Soviet Union’s Luna 9 in 1966. And only the US has put astronauts on the lunar surface: 12 men over six landings.
Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of astronauts’ last lunar landing, by Apollo 17’s Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on December 11 1972.
Nasa’s Apollo Moonshots were all “about the excitement of the technology”, said ispace founder and chief executive Takeshi Hakamada, who had not even been born then. Now, “it’s the excitement of the business.”
Lift-off should have occurred two weeks ago, but was delayed by SpaceX for extra rocket checks.
