Japan's ispace prepares for world's first commercial lunar landing
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[April 25, 2023]
By Kantaro Komiya
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese startup ispace inc is preparing to land its
Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) spacecraft on the moon early on Wednesday, in
what would be the world's first lunar landing by a private company if it
succeeds.
The M1 lander is set to touch down around 1:40 a.m. Japan time (1640 GMT
Tuesday) after taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a SpaceX
rocket in December.
Success would mark a welcome reversal from the recent setbacks Japan has
faced in space technology, where it has big ambitions of building a
domestic industry, including a goal of sending Japanese astronauts to
the moon by the late 2020s.
In one of the biggest blows, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)
last month lost its new medium-lift H3 rocket to forced manual
destruction after it reached space. That was less than five months since
JAXA's solid-fuel Epsilon rocket failed after launch in October.
The 2.3-metre-tall (7.55 ft) M1 will begin an hour-long landing phase
from its current position, in the moon's orbit some 100 km (62 miles)
above the surface moving at nearly 6,000 km/hour (3,700 mph), Chief
Technology Officer Ryo Ujiie told a media briefing on Monday.
Ujiie likened the task of slowing down the lander to the correct speed
against the moon's gravitational pull to "stepping on the brakes on a
running bicycle at the edge of a ski jumping hill."
Only the United States, the former Soviet Union and China have
soft-landed a spacecraft on the moon, with attempts in recent years by
India and a private Israeli company ending in failure.
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Officials of ispace Inc's HAKUTO-R
mission look at live broadcasting of the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9
rocket for ispace at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, in Tokyo,
Japan December 11, 2022. Mandatory credit Kyodo via REUTERS
After reaching the landing site at the edge of Mare Frigoris, in the
moon's northern hemisphere, the M1 is to deploy a two-wheeled,
baseball-sized rover developed by JAXA, Japanese toymaker Tomy Co
and Sony Group, as well as the United Arab Emirates' four-wheeled
"Rashid" Rover.
The M1 is also carrying an experimental solid-state battery made by
NGK Spark Plug Co, among other objects to gauge how they perform on
the moon.
In its second mission scheduled in 2024, the M1 will bring ispace's
own rover, while from 2025, it is set to work with U.S. space lab
Draper to bring NASA payloads to the moon, targeting building a
permanently staffed lunar colony by 2040.
Shares of the Tokyo-based lunar transportation startup had a
blistering market debut on the Tokyo Stock Exchange this month as
investors bet its lunar development and transportation business will
fit in with Japan's national policy of defense and space
development.
(Reporting by Kantaro Komiya; Editing by Chang-Ran Kim and Stephen
Coates)
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