A private Japanese spacecraft failed on its way to the moon’s surface 

A Japanese lunar lander called Resilience failed to softly touch down on the moon’s surface on June 5. The spacecraft’s status is currently unknown after Tokyo-based company ispace lost communication with it, but the lander was unable to decelerate properly. The company is calling it quits on the current mission.

“This is our second failure, and by these results, we have to really take it seriously,” ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada said during a June 5 press briefing. “We have to do some analysis to find out what caused” the problems.

Resilience is the third privately owned spacecraft to attempt a soft moon landing this year. Only one has accomplished that feat.

“Landing is extremely difficult, especially on the lunar surface,” says international space policy expert Namrata Goswami of Johns Hopkins University. Although it’s a setback for the company, it’s not a disaster, she says. “Space technology needs proof of concept, and failures are not uncommon.”

Both of ispace’s missions thus far were meant to prove the organization’s business model, hardware, software, systems and operations, an ispace spokesperson says. The lunar surface activities planned for the next 14 days were going to “open the door to future commercialization.”

Resilience lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on January 15. The rocket simultaneously launched another private lunar lander — Blue Ghost, from Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace — which safely arrived on the moon on March 2.

While Blue Ghost traveled a somewhat direct route, ispace picked a longer one that’s more fuel efficient and cost effective, Goswami says. After whipping around the Earth, followed by a moon flyby in February, Resilience made a loop with its farthest point “about 1.1 million kilometers from Earth, which is deep space,” she says. The motion transferred the spacecraft to lunar orbit in a low-energy way.

The lander carried six commercial customer payloads, including a micro rover called Tenacious made by ispace’s Luxembourg branch that would have explored and collected samples, as well as a deep space radiation probe from Taiwan’s National Central University.

ispace’s first failed moon landing happened in April 2023. That spacecraft plummeted to the moon’s surface due to a software glitch that messed up the lander’s ability to determine its altitude.

Before that crash, ispace had struck a deal with NASA in which the company will sell lunar rocks and soil — that stay on the moon — to the U.S. agency. “It would be the first commercial transaction on the moon and first off-world transaction,” the ispace spokesperson says. The company aims to mine and commercialize lunar resources, starting with water. 

“They want to showcase that the moon is open for business,” Goswami says. 

Although the past two missions focused on research and design, the next one, planned to launch in 2027, will kick off full-scale commercialization, according to ispace. However, the current mission’s failure could affect that, Hakamada said.