As early as 25 April, the Tokyo-based firm ispace will attempt to become the. If the spacecraft touches down safely, it will deliver rovers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and from the United Arab Emirates to the Moon.
“A lot of people are looking at this optimistically, as the beginning of the furthering of expansion into space,” says Stephen Indyk, director of space systems at Honeybee Robotics in Greenbelt, Maryland, who chairs a commercial advisory board for a NASA lunar-science advisory committee.Gustavo Medina Tanco is one of many researchers getting set to study the Moon.
COLMENA will probably launch later this year aboard one of the first flights of a NASA programme called Commercial Lunar Payload Services , which buys rides to the Moon from aerospace companies. The goal is to kick off a series of trips to the Moon, made faster and cheaper by industry. A dozen or more CLPS missions might launch in the next decade, carrying scientific and other payloads to different lunar regions .
“I worry about — can these things land and operate?” asks Thomas Zurbuchen, the former head of science for NASA who started its commercial Moon programme. “The science still needs to prove itself.”The latest wave of Moon landers emerged from the ashes of a privately funded competition, the Google Lunar X Prize, which ran between 2007 and 2018 and aimed to give US$20 million to the first company to land and operate a spacecraft on the Moon.
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