Why Japanese Moon mission’s failure during landing marks yet another setback for private operators

“The lander descended from an altitude of approximately 100 km to approximately 20 km, and then successfully fired its main engine as planned to begin deceleration. While the lander’s altitude was confirmed to be nearly vertical, telemetry was lost thereafter, and no data indicating a successful landing was received, even after the scheduled landing time had passed,” ispace said in a statement.

A hard landing

“Based on the currently available data, the Mission Control Centre has been able to confirm the following: the laser rangefinder used to measure the distance to the lunar surface experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values,” ispace’s statement said.

“As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing. Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface.”

Chandrayaan-2, launched in 2019, had met with a similar fate, being unable to slow down in the final moments due to a malfunction in the thrusters. This is Hakuto-R mission’s second failure to land on the Moon, with its previous attempt in 2023 also unsuccessful.

String of failures

This latest failure underscores the continuing struggle for private space companies to achieve a clean and safe landing on the Moon. In the last two years alone, five missions from private companies have tried to land on the Moon. Only one — US-based Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission, which touched down on the lunar surface on March 2 — has boasted a clean landing.

Intuitive-Machines, a Houston based company, has got its spacecraft to land twice on the Moon, once last year and then again in March this year. But the landings were not entirely perfect both the times. Another US company, Astrobotic Technologies, had planned to land its Peregrine mission on the Moon but it faced technical difficulties during the flight. As such, the spacecraft did not even make its way to the Moon. 

Israel’s Beresheet mission, by a company called SpaceIL, had attempted a Moon landing in 2019, but ended up crashing in a similar fashion to the latest incident.

A tricky finale

The last part of the landing operation, wherein speeding spacecraft slow down to make a soft-landing, is the most complex leg of any Moon landing mission. This is where most accidents occur. For instance, the Luna-25 mission in 2023, which was set to mark Russia’s return to the Moon, also went off the rails only during the final moments of landing.

In the last five years, a Moon landing has been attempted 12 times, by national as well as private space agencies. Only five of these have been able to land in a manner that fulfils the science objectives of the mission. These include Chandrayaan-3 by India, the SLIM mission by Japan, and Chang’e 5 and 6 missions from China.

An increasing number of private space players have been getting ready with their Moon missions, amidst a renewed urgency to explore the Moon with the objective of establishing facilities for long-term stay and research. US space agency NASA, in particular, has been encouraging the private space companies to build capacities and participate in these missions. It has launched a programme called Commercial Lunar Payload Service (CLPS) that is aimed at helping private companies to regularly undertake these complex missions. The missions sent by Astrobotic Technologies, Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace were all part of this CLPS programme. Over a dozen space companies have been contracted by NASA for carrying out these kinds of sorties to the Moon.