First ispace lunar lander feared lost

Controllers lost contact with a lunar lander developed by a Japanese company moments before its scheduled touchdown, raising fears the spacecraft crashed during its final descent. The HAKUTO-R M1 lunar lander, developed by Tokyo-based ispace, was scheduled to land at 12:40 p.m. Eastern April 25 in the vicinity of Atlas Crater on the moon. The lander was in communications with controllers during its powered descent, based on telemetry displayed on the company’s webcast. However, that telemetry appeared to switch from live data to a simulation less than 30 seconds before landing, when the spacecraft was still about 80 meters above the surface, traveling at more than 30 kilometers per hour. There was no confirmation of the landing itself or any signals from the lander after touchdown. More than 25 minutes after the scheduled touchdown, the company appeared to acknowledge that the landing had failed. “At this moment, we have not been able to confirm a successful landing on the lunar surface,” said Takeshi Hakamada, founder and chief executive of ispace. He said controllers had been in contact with the spacecraft until the “very end” of the landing process. “However, now we’ve lost the communication,” he said. “So, we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface.” The lander was carrying a set of payloads for both companies and governments. Among them is Rashid, a small lunar rover developed by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in the United Arab Emirates, and a “transformable lunar robot” the size of a baseball from Japan’s space agency JAXA. Other payloads include cameras and technology demonstrations.

Telemetry from the final phases of the HAKUTO-R M1 landing, just before contact was lost in the final seconds before touchdown. Credit: ispace webcast

The lander launched on a Falcon 9 Dec. 11, placing it on a low-energy ballistic trajectory that took it as far as 1.4 million kilometers from the Earth before returning to the vicinity of the moon, going into an elliptical orbit around the moon March 20.

After achieving its initial orbit of 100 by 6,000 kilometers, the spacecraft maneuvered to lower its orbit, reaching a circular orbit at an altitude of 100 kilometers by April 14. Around that time, ispace announced plans for the April 25 landing attempt.

The company reported only minor issues with the spacecraft during its transit to the moon. “We have been operating our lander as well as expected so far, without any critical issues,” Hakamada said during a Feb. 27 briefing. There had been anomalies with the lander’s thermal control system and computers, but the company said it was able to resolve those problems.

The company is working on a second lander, M2, similar in design to M1 that is scheduled for launch in late 2024. It will carry a set of customer payloads as well as a “micro rover” that ispace developed. That rover will collect a regolith sample that will be transferred to NASA under a 2020 contract awarded to ispace’s European subsidiary.

Company officials said in February that they did not anticipate making significant changes in the design of M2, having already incorporated lessons learned from the development of the M1 lander into M2. The company’s U.S. subsidiary is working on a larger lander, Series 2, for a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services mission led by Draper scheduled for 2025.

Hakamada, in the post-landing comments, said the data collected during the M1 landing attempt would be helpful for those two future missions. “That’s why we built a sustainable business model to continue our effort for the future missions.”

Since the launch of M1, shares in ispace started trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market, an exchanged reserved for smaller, higher-risk companies. The shares started trading April 13 at 254 yen ($1.90) and soared in subsequent days. Shares closed April 25, before the landing, at 1,990 yen.

SpaceX, Blue Origin, Dynetics await NASA lunar lander decision

Elon Musk's SpaceX, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and a lesser-known company, Huntsville, Ala.-based Dynetics, are preparing for a major decision by NASA early in 2021 about which company will build human-carrying landers for trips to the moon. The three space firms were selected in April to submit proposals early this month. Having done that, they now await NASA's decision, which is scheduled for February. The space agency has indicated it could pick one or two of the proposals. At stake is the future of lunar exploration for the United States and large, multimillion-dollar contracts as part of NASA's planned Artemis program. The agency had a goal of landing people on the moon again by 2024, although Congress hasn't funded NASA's budget requests to meet that schedule. A contract for a human lander may be awarded, but it's not clear if such landers will be built anytime soon, said Marco Caceres, space analyst for the Teal Group based in Fairfax, Va. "Artemis was proposed in another age in our history before the pandemic and the recent election, so I'm not convinced it will happen," Caceres said Tuesday. "From a technical standpoint, the Dynetics proposal has strengths, but NASA tends to pick a known quantity for such spaceflight missions." SpaceX already has multiple high-profile contracts with NASA, including the commercial crew contract to take astronauts to the International Space Station, while Blue Origin has flown NASA hardware on the company's New Shepard rocket. Blue Origin lined up legacy space companies Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to help develop a lander, Caceres noted.

Blue Origin, of Kent, Wash., plans to develop a three-stage lander to be launched on its own New Glenn rocket and United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket. But neither of those rockets has launched; both are being developed.

SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., is developing the Starship, a fully integrated lander intended for launch on the Starship Super Heavy rocket. It also is being developed, having completed a prototype test flight to nearly 8 miles high Dec. 9.

Dynetics' lander will provide ascent and descent capabilities and also is planned to be launched on the Vulcan. Dynetics is a tech and engineering firm and a subsidiary of engineering firm Leidos.

All three proposed landers could be refueled at the moon, but Dynetics' lander is designed to be easily reusable for multiple hops around the moon, Robert Wright, Dynetics' program manager, said in an interview Thursday.

Dynetics is the only lander with a horizontal crew cabin, as opposed to an upright, vertical cabin, which would allow faster and easier access to the lunar surface, Wright said.

Both SpaceX and Blue Origin would require a crew to descend on long ladders from a cabin high atop a landing vehicle.

"We're in the unique position of being closer to the lunar surface than the other competitors have shown in their concepts," Wright said.

"Having the horizontal capsule, or chamber, means astronauts would have more room to put spacesuits on, and a dust barrier to prevent gritty moon dust from entering the quarters."

But putting the crew cabin higher over the ground is an advantage for Blue Origin's lander, Blue Moon, the company's chief scientist Steve Squyres said in a recent video news release.

"When you land on an unprepared surface, on no landing pad, there are bad things that can happen," such as rocket thrusters kicking up sharp rocks, Squyres said. "The other thing that can happen is you can crunch your engine on the ground when you land."

Therefore, he said, the Blue Moon lander would put the crew and ascent engines on top, "out of harm's way."

Dynetics' Wright said the company's lander still protects the engines with its design, which shows the bottom of a barrel-shaped capsule extending below the engines to protect them from the ground.

SpaceX declined a request for comment. NASA declined requests for interviews "to protect the integrity of the process" as the contract award announcement nears, a spokeswoman said.

The human lander contract will mark a milestone toward "sending the first woman and next man to the lunar surface in 2024 and establishing sustainable exploration by the end of the decade," according to a NASA statement.

First private spacecraft shoots for the moon

"Moon of Israel" is an epic 1924 film from the golden era of silent movies, and helped launch the directing career of Michael Curtiz, of "Casablanca" fame. Sequels seldom live up to the original. But if Israel's plans to put a robotic lander on the moon in February 2019 can be considered a sequel, this new "Moon of Israel" mission, led by the nonprofit company SpaceIL, will be a blockbuster in its own right. Lunar landings date back to the 1960s. The United States landed 12 people on six separate occasions as part of the Apollo program, along with robotic spacecraft such as Surveyor, which served as a precursor to human missions. The Soviet Union preformed robotic Luna missions and landed Lunokhod automated rovers in the 1970s. Most recently China landed the Chang'e 4 robotic probe on the back side of the moon. These missions are all amazing technical accomplishments, and marvels of human know-how, sponsored and built by large government space agencies. The moon's next visitor is different. SpaceIL's Beresheet - Hebrew for "In the Beginning" - will become the first privately funded mission to launch from Earth and land on the moon, and the first spacecraft to propel itself over the lunar surface after landing by "hopping" on its rocket engine to a second landing spot. The mission marks yet another milestone, not only in the history and technical arc of space exploration, but also in how humankind goes about space exploration.

SpaceIL was founded in 2011 to compete in the Google Lunar XPrize, a program that planned to award US$30 million to the first privately funded team who could build a spacecraft and land it successfully on the moon.

Beyond landing, the spacecraft, or a rover, had to travel a distance of 500 meters or more and beam high-definition imagery of the landing environment to Earth. The Google Lunar XPrize contest deadline ended in 2018 without a winner. Undaunted, SpaceIL forged ahead with the development and construction of the spacecraft, and is now ready to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The Beresheet lander is about the size and shape of a family dinner table, roughly 6 feet in diameter and 4 feet high, weighing (on Earth) about 350 pounds. This doesn't include the nearly 1,000 pounds of fuel needed to land the spacecraft on the moon. Carrying instrumentation to measure the magnetic field of the moon, a laser-reflector provided by NASA and a time-capsule of cultural and historical Israeli artifacts, the mission will ride into space as a secondary payload - like a rideshare passenger - aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Going to the moon, without a rocket

The primary cargo on the SpaceX launch is not the SpaceIL lander, but instead a communications satellite for delivery a very high Earth-centered, geostationary orbit approximately 22,000 miles above the Earth's equator.

This effectively parks the communications satellite above a fixed point on the Earth, its orbit synchronized precisely with our planet's daily rotation. The Beresheet spacecraft will accompany the primary satellite on its journey. But in order to reach the moon, it needs to travel more than 10 times farther.

In spaceflight, the primary constraint in traveling from place to place is not distance, but the quantity of energy required. The Falcon 9 rocket only carries Beresheet about 10 percent of the total distance to the moon.

But it provides nearly 90 percent of the total energy required to get there. Consequently, once lifted from the surface of the Earth, and with a small amount of additional energy from its own propulsion system, Beresheet can boost its own orbit by positioning itself so that it's captured by the moon's gravitational pull. This process will take several weeks.

Once landed on the moon, however, the mission may only last a few more days. The lander is not designed for the long haul, but instead will demonstrate advances in technology as well as the business model for a privately funded spacecraft landing on another body in the solar system. In this sense, Beresheet will create a second and even more memorable "Moon of Israel."

There is no air on the moon - and therefore also no sound. So, like the original 1924 film, this sequel will also be silent. But the participants are not actors, and the view will be in high-definition color.

The technical know-how developed by the engineering team, the scientific and technical data from the spacecraft's instruments, learning how spaceflight missions can be executed outside of a government program, and the inspiration provided for an entire generation of young people - especially in Israel and the Middle East region - will all bring valuable insights and inspiration for decades to come.