The private lander Hakuto-R of the Japanese company Ispace has crashed on the moon with high probability. That’s what the people in charge write. They no longer assume that contact with the probe will be made. Before that, however, the probe had already successfully completed several tasks, assures Ispace and speaks of an important milestone in private space travel. One can build on the experience gained and benefit from it on further missions in 2024 and 2025. Ispace cooperated with the European Space Agency ESA on the mission, whose boss Josef Aschbacher speaks of many fascinating projects that will follow.
Second private lunar probe destroyed
Hakuto-R was launched on December 11 on a Falcon 9 rocket from the US space company SpaceX. It then took a fuel-efficient route to the moon, taking it more than four months to get there. Hakuto means “white rabbit” in Japanese, who lived on the moon in Japanese mythology. The “R” stands for “reboot”, i.e. restart. The mission was not the first attempt at a private moon landing, the Israeli non-profit organization SpaceIL had already shot the Beresheet probe towards the moon in 2019, but it also crashed.
Ispace now explainsthat a total of ten mission objectives had been set for Hakuto-R. Eight of these have been successfully completed, including launch, first in-orbit maneuver, stable flight for a month and entering the moon’s gravitational field. Only mission goals 9 (“Completion of the moon landing”) and 10 (“Establishing a stable system state after landing”) have now been missed. These are now to be achieved on missions 2 and 3, which are also intended to contribute to NASA’s Artemis moon program. But it still remains the case that only the state space agencies of the USA, the Soviet Union and China have successfully landed probes on the moon – NASA as well as people.
Next missions in the starting blocks
Hakuto-R was a lunar lander 2.3 meters high and 2.6 meters wide with the landing legs extended, with a take-off weight of around 1000 kilograms. Without the fuel it was carrying, it weighed only 340 kilograms when it attempted to land on the moon. He could have transported 30 kilograms of cargo. On board was a small United Arab Emirates rover and an even smaller two-wheeled robot developed by Japan’s state space agency JAXA and Japanese toymaker Tomy. Now that the mission has failed, the US competitors Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines have the opportunity to realize the first private moon landing with their planned moon missions.
Speaking to the dpa news agency, German astronaut Reinhold Ewald praised the mission despite the failure. Regardless of the outcome, the “hard landing” is a step forward in space travel and a role model for Europe. “We have to make sure in Europe that we don’t fall behind technically,” said the 66-year-old, who flew to the Russian space station Mir in 1997 in a Soyuz capsule. “The Japanese may have failed on the moon mission – but unfortunately Europe is not even trying.”
(my)
