COLORADO SPRINGS—Ispace is making final preparations for its Hakuto-R Mission 1 lunar landing attempt on April 25.
“Everything is ready. We’ve already done everything we could do,” ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said at the Space Symposium here on April 20. “All the hardware is functioning well.”
Ispace’s lander spacecraft entered lunar orbit on March 21, and since April 12 has been in an elliptical orbit of the Moon, with a closest approach—a periapsis—of about 62 mi. (100 km) and a farthest distance—an apolune—of about 1,429 mi., the company said April 12. The lander was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in December.
An hour before its scheduled landing time on April 25, the lunar lander is expected to begin a sequence from about 62 mi. above the Moon’s surface. The lander will fire its main propulsion system—“a braking burn”—to decelerate from orbit. Using preset commands, the spacecraft will then adjust its attitude and reduce its velocity to land softly on the Moon, the company says.
Ipsace is attempting to be the first private enterprise to land a spacecraft on the Moon. It aims to build a business hauling equipment to the Moon to support the “hydrogen value chain”—a lunar economy focused on finding water and supporting its deconstruction into hydrogen and oxygen using electrolysis.
The company emphasizes it has checked off eight of 10 mission goals en route to the Moon, performance that it will analyze and use to improve during future lunar landing missions. The two remaining goals for Mission 1 are a lunar landing and establishing steady electrical power and telecommunications after landing to support the spacecraft’s payloads.
“We have great assets to feed back to Mission 2 [and] Mission 3 to increase our capability and technology maturity,” Hakamada says.
Mission 2, scheduled for 2024, is to use the same Hakuto-R lander and deploy a rover to explore the Moon and collect data about the lunar surface.
For Mission 3, ispace is designing a larger lander spacecraft for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative under the Artemis program. The company is a subcontractor to Team Draper, which in July won a payload contract worth $73 million to carry out scientific missions to the lunar surface in 2025. That lander will also deploy two relay satellites to support communications on the far side of the Moon.
