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A Tokyo company is targeting the moon with its own private lander, launching Sunday on a SpaceX rocket with the United Arab Emirates’ first lunar rover and Japan’s toy robot designed to roll in the gray dust.
The lander and its experiments will take nearly five months to reach the moon.
ispace designs its vehicles to use the least amount of fuel to save money and leave more room for cargo, so it takes a slow, low-energy path, flying 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, returning and Earth conjuncts the Moon at the end of April.
By comparison, it took NASA’s Orion crew module and test dummy five days to reach the Moon last month. The lunar flyby mission ended with a splash in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday.
The ispace lander will target Atlas Crater on the northeast near side of the moon, which is more than 50 miles (87 kilometers) in diameter and more than a mile (2 kilometers) deep. The lander’s four legs stick out, reaching a height of more than 7 feet (2.3 meters).
With a scientific satellite orbiting Mars, the UAE also wants to explore the moon. Its rover, named Rashid after the Dubai royal family, weighs just 22 pounds (10 kilograms) and will remain on the ground for about 10 days, like everything else on the mission.
Additionally, the lander is carrying an orange-sized sphere provided by the Japanese space agency that will transform into a wheeled robot on the moon.
Also flying were solid-state batteries from Japan’s Spark Plug company; a flight computer from an Ottawa, Ontario-based company with artificial intelligence to identify geological features seen by the UAE rover; and a 360-degree camera from a Toronto-area company.
Riding on the rocket is NASA’s small laser experiment, which will fly itself to the moon to search for ice in permanently shadowed craters at the moon’s south pole.
The ispace mission is called Hakuto, Japanese for White Rabbit. In Asian folklore, it is said that a white rabbit lived on the moon. Private companies are planning a second moon landing in 2024 and a third in 2025.
Founded in 2010, ispace is one of the finalists in the Google Lunar X Prize competition to successfully land on the moon by 2018. The rover built by ispace has never been launched.
Another finalist is an Israeli nonprofit called SpaceIL, which successfully landed on the moon in 2019. But instead of a smooth landing, the Beresheet spacecraft crashed into the moon and was destroyed.
With a predawn launch Sunday from the Cape Canaveral space station, ispace is now on track to become one of the first private entities to try and land on the moon.
Although it won’t launch until early next year, a lunar lander built by Pittsburgh’s Astrobotic Technology and Houston’s Intuitive Machines could beat ispace to the moon due to its shorter cruise time.
Only Russia, the United States and China have achieved so-called “soft landings” on the moon, starting with the former Soviet Union’s Luna 9 in 1966. Only the United States has sent astronauts to the lunar surface: 12 people have made 6 landings.
Sunday, December 11, 1972, marked the 50th anniversary of the last Moon landing by Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt.
NASA’s Apollo missions to the moon were all “excitement about technology,” said ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada, who was not yet born. Now, “it’s the excitement of business.”
Liftoff was supposed to happen two weeks ago, but was delayed by SpaceX for additional rocket inspections.
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