Ispace revises design of lunar lander for NASA CLPS mission

The American subsidiary of Japanese company Ispace has revised the design of a lunar lander it is providing for a NASA mission, pushing back the launch of that mission by a year. The company, ispace technologies U.S., unveiled the new lander design, called APEX 1.0, at a Sept. 28 event at its new headquarters in the Denver suburb of Centennial, Colorado. The lander will be used on a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) mission awarded to Draper in July 2022 that, at the time, planned to use a lander called Series-2. The lander redesign was driven by the needs of the NASA payloads. “The environmentals didn’t close on the Series-2 design, particularly in the area of vibration,” said Ron Garan, chief executive of ispace U.S., in an interview. “We needed to do a complete redesign of the vehicle in order to accommodate that.” The redesign, he said, ensures that the lander can accommodate the widest possible range of payloads. APEX 1.0 will be able to host up to 300 kilograms of payloads, with the ability to expand to 500 kilograms. The lander also supports the ability to release satellites in lunar orbit, which will be used for the CLPS mission to relay communications from its landing site on the lunar farside. Garan said there is strong interest from other customers in flying payloads both on the CLPS mission, called Mission 3 by ispace and CP-12 by NASA, and subsequent ones. That includes rovers as well as experiments in in situ resource utilization (ISRU). “We’re going after both commercial and government contracts to supplement CP-12. We have payload capacity right now,” he said.

The APEX 1.0 lander from ispace U.S. was designed to better accommodate payloads such as those flying on a NASA CLPS mission in 2026. Credit: ispace U.S.

The APEX 1.0 design has completed preliminary design reviews, with ispace projecting it will pass its critical design review (CDR) by March 2024. Garan said CDR is currently scheduled for December.

The revised lander, though, will delay the mission. When NASA selected the Draper-led team for the mission last year, it projected launch in 2025. That launch has now slipped to 2026, ispace said, because of the lander design.

That has financial implications for the company. In a Sept. 28 statement, ispace, traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, said it was lowering its sales forecast for the current fiscal year, which runs through March 2024, by more than 50% to 3.05 billion yen ($20.4 million) because the delays in Mission 3 mean payload sales will be recognized in later years.

Separately, ispace said it was lowering its projected net loss for the year by 3.385 billion yen to 4.5 billion yen, citing the payout from an insurance policy on its HAKUTO-R M1 lander that crashed attempting to land on the moon in April.

The company anticipates growing demand for lunar landers, which motivated the decision to move into a new 4,600-square-meter U.S. headquarters. “If we win some more contracts, we’re going to take off on a steeper exponential curve of growth, and so we need a facility that will enable that,” Garan said.

The facility will be able to support production of future landers, although other partners will handle the assembly, integration and testing of the Mission 3 lander. It will also host a growing engineering workforce. Garan said that ispace U.S. had about 50 employees when he joined three and a half months ago, and has now grown to 85. He projected the company will have more than 100 employees by the end of the year.

“It took ispace U.S. a little bit of time to get off the ground, to get going. We are firing on all cylinders now,” he said. “Out goal is to be a significant player, to make a significant contribution to the establishment of lunar infrastructure.”

China’s Galactic Energy suffers first launch failure

Chinese commercial rocket firm Galactic Energy experienced its first failure Thursday with its 10th launch attempt. Airspace closure notices pointed to a launch attempt from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China at around 1:00 a.m. Eastern, Sept. 21. The window passed without notification of a launch, which would typically follow within an hour of liftoff. Galactic Energy published an article confirming the loss of a Ceres-1 rocket and its payload via its WeChat social network account roughly six hours after launch. The company stated a four-stage Ceres-1 solid rocket lifted off from Jiuquan at 12:59 a.m. Eastern, carrying the Jilin-1 Gaofen-04B satellite for commercial remote sensing firm Changguang Satellite Technology (CGST). The specific reasons are being further analyzed and investigated, according to the Galactic Energy statement. The firm also expressed sincere apologies to its customers.The launch was the firm’s first major setback. All of its nine previous launches were successful, starting in November 2021. Galactic Energy had been executing a high-density period of launches, carrying out four missions between July 22 and Sept. 5, including a first launch from a mobile sea platform off the coast of Shandong province. Ceres-1 has a diameter of 1.4 meters, a length of about 20 meters, a mass at take-off of about 33 tons and a liquid propellant upper stage. It can deliver 400 kg to low Earth orbit (LEO) or 300 kg to a 500-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). This was the first launch to 800 kilometers.

The company, which was founded in February 2018, is meanwhile also preparing for the first launch of its Pallas-1 kerosene-liquid oxygen launcher.

The reusable two-stage Pallas-1 will be capable of carrying 5,000 kilograms to LEO or 3,000 kilograms to 700-km SSO. The first expendable launch is slated for the third quarter of 2024.

CGST is an offshoot from the state-owned Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics (CIOMP) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Established in 2014, CGST has more than 100 satellites in orbit.

The company announced last year that it intends to expand its Jilin-1 constellation from a planned 138 satellites to 300 satellites by 2025.

Galactic Energy’s impressive record up to today appears to have secured it vital contracts to launch Jilin-1 satellites.

The launch was China’s 44th orbital mission of 2023 and the first failure. China’s state-owned main contractor has carried out 30 launches so far of a planned 60 or more, suggesting an intense period of launch activity in the remaining months of the year. The breakdown also highlights the growing role of commercial launch service providers in China.