The lander of the private Japanese space company Ispace may have crashed into the lunar surface

Private Japanese aerospace company Ispace said it attempted to land its Hakuto-R M1 lunar module on the moon I failed: a few meters from the lunar surface, communications with the robot (the probe) were lost, which led to the assumption that it had crashed and was therefore destroyed. Had the mission been completed, it would have been the first private lander to reach the lunar surface.

During a live broadcast of the event, Ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada speculated that the mission was not successful. A few hours later, a statement from the company confirmed “a high probability” that the probe had eventually crashed onto the lunar surface.

So far, no private space company’s spacecraft has managed to land, while space agencies of only three countries have succeeded: the agency of the former Soviet Union, NASA (USA), and CNSA (China). In April 2019, the Israeli Beresheet lander crashed into the lunar surface during a mission to conduct some lunar surveys. However, last Thursday, shortly after launch, a prototype of the spacecraft exploded, the massive spacecraft designed by the private American space company SpaceX, which will be used for the first manned landing on the moon of the Artemis lunar program (expected not before the end). .from 2025).

– Also read: Starship exploded shortly after launch

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