A lunar developed by Japanese space tech firm ispace launched from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Sunday. About 19 hours after separating from the launch vehicle, the lander captured an image of the Earth appearing as a crescent. The Hakuto lander is taking a slow, low-energy path to the Moon that will fly about 1.6 million kilometres from the Earth before looping back and intersecting with the Moon by April next year. In comparison, the Artemis 1 mission took about five days from launch to reach the Moon. Ispace’s 2.3 metres-tall lander will aim for the Atlas crater— which measures more than 87 kilometres across and is over two kilometres deep — in the northeastern section of the Moon’s near side. Tokyo-based ispace was founded in 2019 and was among the finalists in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition, which called for privately-funded teams to land a lander on the Moon. But the lander built by the company never until last week. Although it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate to call Hakuto the first privately-built lunar lander, a lunar lander built by Pittsburgh-based Astrobiotic Technology and Houston-based Intuitive Machines might beat the former to the Moon even though the latter will not launch until early next year. This is because of the latter’s shorter cruise time. But this does not discount the historic nature of the mission. So far, only the United States, Russia and China have managed a “soft landing” on the Moon.
