Japan's ispace prepares for world's first commercial lunar landing
25/04/2023 07:29
By Kantaro Komiya
TOKYO, April 25 (Reuters) - Japanese startup ispace inc
9348.T 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.
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 7867.T and Sony Group 6758.T , 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 5334.T , 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 defence and
space development.
(Reporting by Kantaro Komiya; Editing by Chang-Ran Kim and
Stephen Coates)
((Kantaro.Komiya@thomsonreuters.com; Twitter: @kantarokomiya;))