Failed moon landing: The "White Hare" thought he was already there

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Ispace boss Takeshi Hakamada is consternated in front of the screen on which he actually wanted to watch the first commercial moon landing

Photograph:

Kim Kyung-Hoon / REUTERS

Off to the moon, bagging samples and material, bringing them back to Earth and then all over again – the Tokyo-based company Ispace sees this as a business model. The moon landing of the "Hakuto-R" probe – translated as "White Hare-R" – was intended to usher in a new era in the use of lunar resources. But things turned out differently. Two days after the scheduled date for the first private moon landing, the company declared the mission a failure.

Now, after evaluating the flight data, the company has announced the cause of this. An erroneous altitude calculation had led to the failure of "Hakuto-R Mission 1". Accordingly, the probe had initiated the landing sequence at the planned time and continued the descent at a speed throttled to around three kilometers per hour. However, at that time it was just under five kilometers above the lunar surface. When the propulsion system ran out of fuel, "Hakuto-R" crashed into the Atlas crater in free fall, it said. In short, the probe thought it was much closer to its destination than it actually was.

Further private lunar missions planned for 2024 and 2025

"The most likely reason for the lander's incorrect elevation estimate was that the software did not work as expected," it said in a statement. The company had not received any data from the lander last month shortly after the targeted landing time. If successful, it would have been the world's first private moon landing. For the second and third missions, which are planned for 2024 and 2025, improvements will now be made, the Japanese company further announced.

"Hakuto" means "white hare" in Japanese, who lived on the moon in Japanese mythology. The "R" stands for the English term "reboot" and thus for the restart after a first failed development.

The 340-kilogram Ispace lunar probe set off in December 2022. A rocket from the US space company SpaceX had brought them into space from Cape Canaveral. "Hakuto-R" had several lunar vehicles on board, including an eight-centimeter model built by the Japanese Space Agency with the toy manufacturer Takara Tomy. The probe is also expected to bring a UAE rover to the moon.

Ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada had already spoken in advance of the planned moon landing as a "historic day" that would herald "a new era of commercial lunar missions". In the long term, the company wants to expand the "sphere of human life into space".

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