Japanese lunar lander crashes during attempted touchdown

A private lunar lander from Japan crashed while attempting a touchdown Friday, the latest casualty in the commercial rush to the moon.

The Tokyo-based company ispace declared the mission a failure several hours after communication was lost with the lander. Flight controllers scrambled to regain contact, but were met with only silence and said they were concluding the mission.

Communications ceased less than two minutes before the spacecraft's scheduled landing on the moon with a mini-rover. Until then, the descent from lunar orbit seemed to be going well.

CEO and founder Takeshi Hakamada apologized to everyone who contributed to the mission, the second lunar strikeout for ispace.

Two years ago, the company's first moonshot also ended in a crash landing, giving rise to the name "Resilience" for its successor lander.

"This is the second time that we were not able to land. So we really have to take it very seriously," Hakamada told reporters. He stressed that the company would press ahead with more lunar missions.

Preliminary analysis indicates the laser system for measuring the altitude did not work as planned, and the lander descended too fast, officials said.

"Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface," the company said in a written statement.

Long the province of governments, the moon became a target of private outfits in 2019, with more flops than wins along the way.

Launched in January from Florida on a long, roundabout journey, Resilience entered lunar orbit last month. It shared a SpaceX ride with Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost, which reached the moon faster and became the first private entity to successfully land there in March.

Another U.S. company, Intuitive Machines, arrived at the moon a few days after Firefly. But the tall, spindly lander face-planted in a crater near the moon's south pole and was declared dead within hours.

Resilience was targeting the top of the moon, a less treacherous place than the shadowy bottom. The ispace team chose a flat area with few boulders in Mare Frigoris, or Sea of Cold, a long and narrow region full of craters and ancient lava flows that stretches across the near side's northern tier.

Plans had called for the 2.3-metre Resilience to beam back pictures within hours and for the lander to lower the piggybacking rover onto the lunar surface this weekend.

Made of carbon fibre-reinforced plastic with four wheels, ispace's European-built rover — named Tenacious — sported a high-definition camera to scout out the area and a shovel to scoop up some lunar dirt for NASA.

The rover, weighing just five kilograms, was going to stick close to the lander, going in circles at a speed of less than a few centimetres per second. It was capable of venturing up to one kilometre from the lander.

Minutes before the attempted landing, Hakamada assured everyone that ispace had learned from its first failed mission. "Engineers did everything they possibly could" to ensure success this time, he said.

He considered the latest moonshot "merely a steppingstone" to its bigger lander launching by 2027 with NASA involvement.

Ispace, like other businesses, does not have "infinite funds" and cannot afford repeated failures, Jeremy Fix, chief engineer for the company's U.S. subsidiary, said at a conference last month.

While not divulging the cost of this latest mission, company officials said it's less than the first one which exceeded $100 million US.

Two other U.S. companies are aiming for moon landings by year's end: Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and Astrobotic Technology. Astrobotic's first lunar lander missed the moon altogether in 2024 and came crashing back through Earth's atmosphere.

For decades, governments competed to get to the moon. Only five countries have pulled off successful robotic lunar landings: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan. Of those, only the U.S. has landed people on the moon: 12 NASA astronauts from 1969 through 1972.

NASA expects to send four astronauts around the moon next year. That would be followed a year or more later by the first lunar landing by a crew in more than a half-century, with SpaceX's Starship providing the lift from lunar orbit all the way down to the surface. China also has moon landing plans for its own astronauts by 2030.