Japanese space company ispace announced that its uncrewed moon lander, Resilience, likely crashed during its attempted lunar landing on Friday (June 6), marking its second failure following an unsuccessful mission two years ago. Based in Tokyo, ispace aimed to become the first non-U.S. company to complete a commercial moon landing, joining American firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace in the expanding international race to explore the moon, which also includes national space programs from China and India. According to ispace, the Resilience lander failed to slow down sufficiently during its final approach and has since lost all communication, suggesting a hard impact. Data from the spacecraft was lost less than two minutes before the expected touchdown, as shown in the companys live broadcast of the event.

The lander was targeting Mare Frigoris, a lunar plain roughly 900 kilometers from the moon’s north pole, during a one-hour descent from lunar orbit. At a live viewing event held at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp., more than 500 ispace employees, investors, sponsors, and officials fell into silence as the outcome became apparent. Meanwhile, ispace shares remained untraded due to a flood of sell orders, with prices expected to hit the daily limit-low — a nearly 29% drop. Before this event, the company’s market value was over 110 billion yen (approximately S$983 million).

The Resilience mission followed the companys 2023 failure, where its first lander crashed because of a misjudged altitude reading. While ispace had since fixed the software issues, the hardware design for Resilience remained mostly unchanged. This mission carried a four-wheeled rover from ispace’s Luxembourg division, along with five other payloads valued at US$16 million (S$20 million), including scientific equipment from Japanese businesses and a Taiwanese university.

Had the landing succeeded, the 2.3-meter-tall lander and its compact rover would have spent 14 days exploring the lunar surface, capturing images of regolith (moon dust) under a contract with NASA. Resilience launched aboard a SpaceX rocket in January, sharing its ride with Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, which took a quicker path and landed successfully in March. Intuitive Machines, which achieved the world’s first commercial moon landing last year, attempted a second landing in March, but its Athena lander ended up on its side, similar to its earlier mission.

Japan had previously succeeded in soft-landing on the moon in 2023 through its national space agency JAXA, becoming the fifth country to do so — following the USSR, USA, China, and India — although its SLIM lander also landed in a toppled position. Despite changes in U.S. space policy under President Donald Trump, Japan continues its strong participation in NASA’s Artemis lunar program, committing both astronauts and technologies to upcoming missions. Looking ahead, ispace plans seven additional missions between now and 2029 in both Japan and the U.S., including one in 2027 as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, to meet the rising demand for lunar transport.

Disclaimer: This image is taken from Reuters.