Next week could see the first private company land on the Moon, fully intact at least.
As part of the HAKUTO-R mission 1, an uncrewed lunar lander built by Japan's ispace Inc is scheduled to touch down on the lunar surface on either 25 or 26 April.
The company's stated aim is to eventually provide high-frequency, low-cost transportation services to the Moon.
It would be the winner of what some in the space industry have been calling the new 'moon race', with launches of landers from US-based pair Astrobotic Technology and Intuitive Machines Inc (NASDAQ:LUNR).
Since the last successful mission to the Moon, NASA's Apollo 17 in 1972, other spacecraft have 'landed' on the Moon though not in one piece, with a Japanese probe crash-landing in 2009 and technical failures such as Israeli non-profit SpaceIL in 2019.
Japan on the Moon
Last week the recently Tokyo-listed company said the spaceship has completed all its planned orbital control manoeuvres under the direction of engineers back in Japan's capital city on Earth, with its final pre-landing practice activity being a 1-minute controlled burn from the lander’s main propulsion system.
The lander was launched in December in a SpaceX Falcon rocket and was successfully inserted into an elliptical lunar orbit last month with an altitude of about 100 km at the perigee (periapsis) and about 6,000 km at the apogee (apoapsis), followed by two orbit control maneuvers. The lander has now reached a 100 km circular orbit around the Moon.
Landing on the Moon is scheduled for next Wednesday, April 25 at 15:40 UTC (0.40am in Japan, 4.40pm in the UK, 11.40am in New York), when the module should begin landing sequence from the 100 km altitude orbit.
During this process, ispace said the lander will perform a braking burn, firing its main propulsion system to decelerate from orbit.
Using pre-set commands, the lander is designed to adjust its attitude and reduce velocity in order to make a soft landing on the lunar surface, with the whole process taking roughly one hour and available to watch via a live-streaming broadcast from Tokyo planned for the day.
Should conditions change, there are three alternative landing sites and depending on the site, the landing date may change. Alternative landing dates, depending on the operational status, are 26 April, 1 May and 3 May.
Originally, ispsace was a partner of a Netherlands-based outfit called White Label Space, a team of space engineers founded by internet entrepreneur Steve Allen in 2008 to compete in Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL)'s US$20mln Lunar X Prize - as was SpaceIL.
Led by Takeshi Hakamada, the Japanese arm split off in 2013 and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange earlier this month.
"ispace’s vision is to expand the human living sphere into space," Hakamada said at the IPO, saying the company aims to "build an economic zone in the space between the earth and the moon", known as cislunar space, through commercialising the lunar surface.
"In the future, since the utilization of space will become even more essential to maintain our prosperous life on earth, the growth potential of this economic zone may be enormous," he said.
Moon racers
Based on their chosen launch vehicles and the small handful of days each month available for launches to get the right trajectory to get to the moon, ispace's closest rivals might not be as close as they had hoped.
US-based Intuitive Machines, which has three contracts with NASA, is due to launch in June and is aiming to demonstrate precision landing technologies and communication and navigation capabilities, along with scientific objectives including studying radio astronomy and space weather.
Intuitive's Nova-C lander, which will be carried into space on a Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX, is built to operate for one lunar day, equivalent to around 14 Earth days.
A second lander from the Houston-based company is due to be part of the IM-2 mission also with SpaceX in November this year, with a primary payload being an ice drill that will attempt to harvest ice from below the lunar surface.
Based on current scheduling it could be beaten by Pittsburg-based Astrobotic, however its much-delayed mission to carry its Peregrine lander to the Moon is not going to be using SpaceX, which might add to delays.
Instead, it will be getting aboard the Vulcan Centaur launch vehicle from United Launch Alliance (ULA), the joint venture between Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) and Boeing (NYSE:BA).
This much-delayed mission has most recently been set for May 4.
But this will be the maiden launch for Vulcan Centaur, which slipped several times last year but needs to be successful not just for Astrobotic but also for ULA.
Intuitive and Astrobotic are part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, launched in 2018, which has seen a combined maximum contract value of US$2.6bn of funding pledged to 14 companies.
Also scheduled for 2023, Masten Space Systems is pencilled in to deliver and operate eight payloads to the lunar south pole.
In 2024, Astrobotic is down to deliver NASA's VIPER rover to the lunar South Pole, Firefly Aerospace to deliver a suite of payloads to a non-polar region of the Moon, and Intuitive makes its third appearance, delivering research to Reiner Gamma.
In 2025, Draper is due to deliver science investigations to Schrödinger Basin, a large lunar impact crater on the far side of the Moon close to the south pole.
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