#ispace

Tenacious (2025) by ispace, Japan. The Resilience lander is due to touchdown on the moon's "Sea of Cold" on Thursday June 5, 2025. Resilience is ispace's latest lunar lander using the same design as the failed Hakuto-R Mission 1. Weighing just 5kg, the Tenacious rover has a carbon fibre-reinforced plastic frame and includes a forward-mounted high-definition camera and a small shovel to collect samples for imaging by the camera. One noteworthy feature mounted on the chassis of the rover is an artwork by Mikael Genberg called the "Moonhouse"; a tiny model of an iconic Swedish red house.

"The Moon House will be the first site-specific artwork on the Moon created at the moment the House is installed on the Moon. The moon has always stimulated man's imagination with its cold beauty. The knowledge that there is a red house with white trim in the middle of the 'magnificent desolation', as one of the first lunar travelers put it, has the potential to change the whole picture. No matter what thoughts and feelings the lunar house generates in each of us, it leaves no one untouched." – Mikael Genberg.

The moon casts a shadow over Australia during a total solar eclipse, as the Earth rises over the moon's horizon. Days before Japan's Hakuto-R lunar lander  crashed into the moon's surface on  April 25, 2023, it snapped this gorgeous picture of our planet.

The HAKUTO-R M1 lunar lander appeared to be descending to the Moon as planned, posing ispace to claim the historic feat of the first private Moon landing – until it was supposed to touch down. The control room appeared tense in a livestream of the operation, which cut away after about five minutes with no update.

When the livestream resumed, ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said that his team had communication with the lander up until the "very end" of the landing attempt.

"However, now we lost the communication, so we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface," he said. "Our engineers will continue to investigate the situation, and then we will update you [with] further information."

TOKYO, Sept 7 (Reuters) - Japan launched its lunar exploration spacecraft on Thursday aboard a homegrown H-IIA rocket, hoping to become the world's fifth country to land on the moon early next year.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said the rocket took off from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan as planned and successfully released the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM).

Unfavourable weather led to three postponements in a week last month.

Dubbed the "moon sniper," Japan aims to land SLIM within 100 metres of its target site on the lunar surface.

The $100-million mission is expected to start the landing by February after a long, fuel-efficient approach trajectory.

"The big objective of SLIM is to prove the high-accuracy landing ... to achieve 'landing where we want' on the lunar surface, rather than 'landing where we can'," JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa told a news conference.

The launch comes two weeks after India became the fourth nation to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon with its Chandrayaan-3 mission to the unexplored lunar south pole.

Around the same time, Russia's Luna-25 lander crashed while approaching the moon.

Two earlier lunar landing attempts by Japan failed in the last year.

JAXA lost contact with the OMOTENASHI lander and scrubbed an attempted landing in November.

The Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander, made by Japanese startup ispace (9348.T), crashed in April as it attempted to descend to the lunar surface.

SLIM is set to touch down on the near side of the moon close to Mare Nectaris, a lunar sea that, viewed from Earth, appears as a dark spot.

Its primary goal is to test advanced optical and image processing technology.

After landing, the craft aims to analyse the composition of olivine rocks near the sites in search of clues about the origin of the moon. No lunar rover is loaded on SLIM.

Thursday's H-IIA rocket also carried the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) satellite, a joint project of JAXA, NASA and the European Space Agency.

The satellite aims to observe plasma winds flowing through the universe that scientists see as key to helping understand the evolution of stars and galaxies.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (7011.T) manufactured the rocket and operated the launch, which marked the 47th H-IIA rocket Japan has launched since 2001, bringing the vehicle's success rate close to 98%.

JAXA had suspended the launch of H-IIA carrying SLIM for several months while it investigated the failure of its new medium-lift H3 rocket during its debut in March.

Japan's space missions have faced other recent setbacks, with the launch failure of the Epsilon small rocket in October 2022, followed by an engine explosion during a test in July.

The country aims to send an astronaut to the moon's surface in the latter half of the 2020s as part of NASA's Artemis programme.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/japan-launches-rocket-carrying-moon-lander-slim-after-three-delays-2023-09-06/

Japan launches 'Moon Sniper' mission | AFP

7 September 2023

China’s iSpace performs first ever Chinese private sector launch.

China’s rapidly expanding aerospace industry achieved a significant milestone Thursday, July 25, with the first ever successful launch of a commercially-developed rocket.

Beijing Interstellar Glory Space Technology Ltd, known as iSpace, launched their Hyperbola-1 rocket at 1pm Chinese Standard Time, or 1am EDT, from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi desert. The rocket carried four payloads; three of them were attached to the rocket’s upper stage while the fourth, the CAS-7B radio satellite, was launched for Chinese Central Television. Hyperbola-1 stands more than 20.8 meters tall (65.2 feet) with a diameter of 1.5 meters (4.6 feet). Two of the rocket’s three stages are fueled by solid propellant while the vehicle’s third stage consists of liquid propellant.

This marked the first time a launch vehicle developed by a private company, rather than the state-run China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation orbited a satellite. Two other Chese NewSpace firms, LandSpace Technology Corporation and OneSpace Technology Co, attempted orbital launches in late 2018 and early 2019 but were unsuccessful. 

iSpace plans on using Hyperbola-1 as a testbed for technology needed for Hyperbola-2, a 98-foot, two stage, reusable liquid fueled rocket powered by an in-house developed JD-1 methalox engine. The company hopes this could launch two tons to low Earth orbit by 2021.

Burning liquid Methane and Oxygen, methalox engines are becoming popular in the commercial space industry as the most efficient means of reusable rocket engine technology. SpaceX is developing their methalox Raptor engine for the Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicles.