Japan’s ispace, US’s Firefly launch commercial moon landers

ORLANDO/TOKYO: Two moon landers, one from Japan’s ispace and another from U.S. space firm Firefly, began their journeys into space on Wednesday with SpaceX’s unusual double moonshot launch, underscoring the global rush to examine the lunar surface.

Japanese moon exploration company ispace launched its Hakuto-R Mission 2, making its second attempt to land on the moon after an initial mission in April 2023 failed in its final moments because of an altitude miscalculation.

Texas-based Firefly Aerospace launched its first moon lander, Blue Ghost, making it the third company to launch a moon lander under NASA’s public-private Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

About 300 ispace staff, families and partners clapped and cheered as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket carrying the landers blasted off from Florida at 3:11 p.m. Japan time (0611 GMT).

The rocket released Blue Ghost on schedule about an hour after liftoff, and ispace’s lander Resilience about 30 minutes after that.

Speaking after the separation, ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada praised the company’s determination to try again after 2023’s failure.

“A moon landing is not a dream but it has become a reality …and a success would be a huge, huge step forward for ispace,” he told reporters.

Intuitive Machines’ moon landing last year, albeit lopsided and partially unsuccessful, marked the first private company and the first CLPS mission to touchdown on the moon.

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An earlier attempt by CLPS member Astrobotic’s lander failed shortly after launch.

Countries and private companies worldwide have been focused on the moon in recent years for its potential to host astronaut bases and hold resources that could be mined for in-space applications, making Earth’s natural satellite a stage for national prestige and geopolitical competition akin to the Cold War-era space race.

Resilience is carrying $16 million worth of customer missions and six payloads in total, including an in-house “Micro Rover” that will deploy from the lander and collect lunar samples, said ispace Executive Business Director Jumpei Nozaki in an interview.

Resilience is expected to touch down on the moon’s surface in around May-June. It will take an energy-efficient path relying heavily on the Earth and moon’s gravity in a winding series of flybys to steer its trajectory, similar to the Japanese space agency’s SLIM which succeeded in the country’s first lunar landing last year.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost aims to reach the moon 45 days after launch, around March 2. The lander is carrying 10 payloads from a variety of NASA-funded customers and one from Blue Origin-owned Honeybee Robotics.

Both landers’ missions will last a full lunar day, or roughly two weeks. They will not survive the frigid lunar nighttime where temperatures can plunge to roughly minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 128 Celsius).

NASA with its Artemis program aims to return humans to the moon by 2027 - but likely later - for the first time since 1972, while China plans to put its own crews on the lunar surface by 2030 following a series of robotic missions.

CLPS missions like Firefly’s Blue Ghost, privately owned but substantially funded by NASA, are meant to study the moon’s surface and stimulate private lunar demand before NASA sends humans there using SpaceX’s Starship and later Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander.

But the U.S. space agency faces potential changes to its Artemis program with the incoming administration of Donald Trump, who as president-elect has largely sided with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s vision to focus heavily on Mars.

“We’ve invested in going to the moon and I think everybody wants us to go back to the moon,” Nicky Fox, head of NASA’s science mission directorate who oversees CLPS, told Reuters on Tuesday when asked about potential changes to the moon program.

“The great thing about NASA science – we do amazing science wherever we go,” she said.