The Japanese company’s spacecraft probably crashed during an attempted moon landing

A Japanese company has lost contact with a small robotic spacecraft it sent to the moon. Analysis of data from the vehicle suggests that it ran out of propellant on final approach and instead of landing gently, crashed into the lunar surface.

After the main engine fired, the Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander built by Ispace of Japan fell out of lunar orbit. About an hour later, Tuesday at 12:40 a.m. Eastern Time, the lander, about 7 feet tall, was expected to land in Atlas Crater, a 54-mile-wide feature in the northeast quadrant of the moon’s near side.

But after the time of landing, no signal was received from the spacecraft. On a live video streamed by the company, a hush reigned in the Tokyo control room, where Ispace engineers, mostly young and from around the world, looked at their screens with worried expressions.

In a statement released Wednesday morning in Japan, the company reported that Ispace engineers noted that the estimated residual propellant was “at the lower threshold and shortly thereafter the rate of descent increased rapidly.”

In other words, the spacecraft ran out of fuel and fell.

Communication with the spacecraft was then lost. “Based on this, it has been determined that there is a good chance that the lander eventually made a hard landing on the lunar surface,” the company said.

An investigation will now have to determine why the spacecraft apparently misjudged its altitude. The analysis suggests it was still high when it should have been on the ground.

In an interview, Takeshi Hakamada, the CEO of Ispace, said that he was nevertheless “very proud” of the result. “I’m not disappointed,” he said.

The data obtained by the spacecraft will allow the company to apply “lessons learned” to its next two missions, Mr Hakamada said.

The Hakuto-R spacecraft launched in December and took a circuitous but energy-efficient path to the moon, where it entered lunar orbit in March. For the past month, engineers have been checking the lander’s systems before proceeding with the landing attempt.

The Ispace lander could have been the first step towards a new paradigm of space exploration, with governments, research institutions and companies sending science experiments and other payloads to the moon.

The start of that lunar transport transition will now have to wait for other companies later this year. Two commercial landers, built by US companies and funded by NASA, will be launched to the moon in the coming months.

NASA created its Commercial Lunar Payload Service Program, or CLPS, in 2018 because buying rides on private spacecraft for instruments and equipment to the moon promises to be cheaper than building its own vehicles. In addition, NASA hopes to spur a new commercial industry around the moon, and competition among lunar companies would likely further reduce costs. The program is based in part on a similar effort that successfully provided transportation to and from the International Space Station.

So far, however, NASA has little to prove for its efforts. The first two missions later this year, by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh and Intuitive Machines of Houston, are years behind schedule, and some of the companies NASA selected to bid for CLPS missions have already gone out of business.

Ispace is planning a second mission next year with a lander of almost the same design. In 2026, a larger Ispace lander will carry NASA payloads to the far side of the moon as part of a CLPS mission led by Draper Laboratory of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Two countries – Japan and the United Arab Emirates – lost payloads aboard the lander. JAXA, the Japanese space agency, wanted to test a two-wheeled transformable lunar robot, and the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai sent a small rover to explore the landing site. Each would have been the first robotic explorer for that country on the lunar surface.

Other payloads included a solid-state battery test module from NGK Spark Plug Company, an artificial intelligence flight computer, and 360-degree cameras from Canadensys Aerospace.

During their space race more than 50 years ago, the United States and the Soviet Union both successfully sent robotic spacecraft to the surface of the moon. More recently, China has landed undamaged spacecraft on the moon three times.

However, other attempts have failed.

Beresheet, an effort by SpaceIL, an Israeli non-profit organization, crashed in April 2019 when a command to the spacecraft accidentally shut down the main engine, causing the spacecraft to crash to its destruction.

Eight months later, the Vikram lander from India drifted about a mile above the surface during its landing attempt and then stalled.

If the Ispace lander has crashed, it may take some time to understand what happened from the telemetry sent back by the spacecraft. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was finally able to spot the Beresheet and Vikram crash sites, and may also be able to find M1’s resting place in the Atlas crater.

Ispace is not the only private space company to run into trouble in the early months of 2023. New rocket models built by SpaceX, ABL Space Systems, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Relativity failed on their very first flights, though some got further into space than others. Virgin Orbit’s most recent rocket launch failed and the company later declared bankruptcy, though it continues to work on a new launch.

At the same time, the launch frequency is higher than ever, with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket having dozens of successful launches so far in 2023. An Arianespace rocket also sent a European Space Agency probe on a mission to Jupiter.