Japanese lunar craft likely crashed during Moon landing, company says

Company officials lost contact with the lander just before it was supposed to set down on the Moon

Officials at the Japanese company ispace believe the lunar lander they were attempting to successfully land on the surface of the Moon suffered a crash landing.

Ispace flight controllers lost contact with the lunar lander just as it was scheduled to land and were never able to re-establish contact, leading them to conclude their attempt to become the first crew to landa a commercially-developed spacecraft on the Moon had failed.

Now, officials have reason to believe the spacecraft crashed. Ispace said in a statement on Tuesday evening that its engineers were still in the process of attempting to figure out why the landing had failed at the crucial moment.

“It has been determined that there is a high probability that the lander eventually made a hard landing,” Ispace said in a statement.

The company, headquartered in Toyko, was attemping to become the first corporation to land a spacecraft on the Moon carrying a rover produced by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai.

“We believe that we have fully accomplished the significance of this mission, having acquired a great deal of data and experience,” ispace CEO and founder Takeshi Hakamada said in comments reported by Al Jazeera. “What is important is to feed this knowledge and learning back to Mission 2 and beyond,” he continued.

The scale of what ispace was attempting to achieve is remarkable: only three governments have ever successfully landed a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon, and of those three, only the United States was able to land a human being.

The company has been working to send a lander to the Moon for years. The firm, which was initially launched in partnership with another firm called White Label Space, competed to win the $20m Google Lunar XPrize for landing a robotic rover on the Moon and transmiting data back to Earth before the competition was shut down in 2018.