The latest pupils to walk out of one of her tests with only a new crater to show for it are the team at ispace, a Japanese company, which tried, and failed, to landon April 25th. The spacecraft, launched last December, had performed nicely as it took a slow, energy efficient trajectory out to the Moon, inserted itself into orbit, and adjusted that orbit until it was circling at 100km just as intended.
Quite why the spacecraft ran out of fuel a bit before the finish line is not clear. But it is not the end of the story. Managing to get to within a few kilometres of the Moon’s surface may sound like something of a pyrrhic victory, but it shows that most of the company’s engineering works. What is more, the mission was insured , though whether the crash falls within the scope of the policy has not been announced.
As the listing and the orderbook bear witness, the biggest difference between ispace and the entities that have landed on the Moon before is that it is a private company. All previous landings have been by national space agencies. Companies did not attempt them because there was no commercial opportunity. Now, though, there is. America’s space agency,, is buying delivery-to-the-Moon services from a range of startups and joint ventures.
America is not the only customer. There are countries which would like to do research on the Moon that have no lunar spacecraft of their own and do not relish the hassle of developing them.Peregrine 1 , the first Astrobotic mission, will carry a set of five micro-rovers developed by Mexico’s space agency.can but add to the next missions’ jitters. History shows that most teams trying to land on the Moon fail on their first attempt. The Soviet Union did so in the 1960s; the Indian space agency and an Israeli mission did so in 2019.
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