Japanese startup ispace targets Moon success with second lunar lander mission

Japanese startup ispace is preparing to take another shot at the Moon. On Thursday, the company's leadership announced that a second lunar lander, called Resilience, will launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on January 15, traveling alongside a competing American spacecraft in what the company is calling the first private-sector rocket rideshare to the Moon. The mission represents a second chance for ispace after an earlier attempt ended badly.

In April 2023, ispace's first lunar lander crashed into the Moon's surface in what the company describes as an unsalvageable hard landing. The failure cost the startup its chance to become the first private company to successfully land on the Moon—a distinction that went instead to Houston-based Intuitive Machines, which accomplished the feat last year with an uncrewed craft that touched down at an awkward angle but still managed to conduct experiments and transmit photographs back to Earth. For ispace, the setback stung. But founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada framed the upcoming mission as proof that the company had absorbed the lessons from that crash. "We at ispace were disappointed in the failure of Mission 1," he told reporters. "But that's why we hope to send a message to people across Japan that it's important to challenge ourselves again, after enduring the failure and learning from it."

The Resilience lander will share its launch with Blue Ghost, a lunar lander built by American company Firefly Aerospace. The two spacecraft will follow different timelines to the Moon—Firefly's lander is expected to arrive after 45 days of travel, with ispace's Resilience following behind and targeting a landing at the end of May or in June. If Resilience touches down successfully, it will deploy a micro rover and five additional payloads from corporate partners. One of those payloads comes from Takasago Thermal Engineering, which plans to conduct an experiment splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen gas, with an eye toward using hydrogen as fuel for satellites and spacecraft.

The rideshare arrangement reflects a broader shift in how private companies are approaching space exploration. By sharing launch costs with another lander, ispace has reduced expenses for the mission officially designated Hakuto-R Mission 2. This cost-cutting approach matters because the private space industry is increasingly competitive. Only five nations have ever soft-landed a spacecraft on the Moon: the Soviet Union, the United States, China, India, and Japan. Now multiple private companies are racing to join that list, each betting that they can offer cheaper and more frequent access to space than governments have historically provided.

Japan itself is becoming a hub for this private space ambition. Space One, another Japanese startup, is attempting to become the country's first company to launch a satellite into orbit, though the effort has stumbled. Last month, Space One's solid-fuel Kairos rocket lifted off from a private launchpad in western Japan but was later observed spiraling downward. That marked the second setback for the company; an initial launch attempt in March of the previous year ended in a mid-air explosion. Meanwhile, Toyota announced this week that it would invest seven billion yen—approximately $44 million—in Interstellar Technologies, another Japanese rocket startup. The carmaker's investment signals confidence in the sector's potential. According to Interstellar, global demand for small satellite launches has surged dramatically, climbing from 141 launches in 2016 to 2,860 in 2023, driven by private space businesses, national security concerns, and technological advancement. Against this backdrop of accelerating activity, ispace's second lunar attempt arrives at a moment when the stakes for private space exploration have never been higher.