“HThere is a high probability that the ‘Lunar Lander’ lander eventually made a hard landing on the surface of the Moon,” Ispace said in a statement.
“We have no plans to resume landing”, admitted the executive director and founder of the ‘start-up’, Takeshi Hakamada, more than six hours after Ispace lost contact with the Hakuto-R spacecraft.
The Japanese spacecraft stopped having contact with the control center that guided it from Tokyo, and the flight controllers that accompanied the journey were left without any communication.
The mission should have arrived at its destination at 15:41 on Sunday, in Lisbon, according to the countdown, seen in the live transmission that the Japanese company made of the beginning of the landing process.
The spacecraft began its descent from an altitude of 100 kilometers above the Moon and was scheduled to land in Atlas, an 87-kilometer crater in the lunar northern hemisphere, and it was already during the landing process that contact was lost.
If the spacecraft had landed, the company would be responsible for the first private project to successfully carry out a lunar landing.
Only three state projects, from Russia, the United States and China, have so far managed to land on the Moon.
In 2019, an Israeli nonprofit tried to do so, but the spacecraft was destroyed on impact.
Founded in 2010, Ispace defines itself as a “global company” whose vision is to “expand the planet” and “expand the future”, based on concrete actions such as offering transport services between the Earth and the Moon.
The company has offices in Japan, Luxembourg and the United States, and develops joint projects with the North American space agency (NASA) and the European Space Agency.
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