Japan's Ispace Assumes Failure in Bid To Make First Commercial Moon Landing

Japanese startup ispace assumed failure in its attempt to make the first private moon landing on Tuesday as engineers struggled to regain contact with the company's Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) lander long after it was due for a lunar touchdown. From a report: "We lost the communication, so we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface," ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said on a company live stream, as mission control engineers in Tokyo continued to try regaining contact with the lander. The M1 lander appeared set to touch down around 12:40 p.m. Eastern time (1640 GMT Tuesday) after coming as close as 295 feet from the lunar surface, a live animation of the lander's telemtry showed.

Well..it might have landed on the moon still..

[Tyr07]

Just not in a desirable way...

Proof of aliens

[backslashdot]

NASA has no explanation, therefore this is indisputable proof of aliens. An alien, most likely a green alien, ate it.

Re:

[CityZen]

If the internet does not shortly produce a video of the Hakuto-R lander being eaten by a Dune spice worm, I will be disappointed.

Re:

[Tyr07]

Lander had an animation for it's potion. Clearly fake, never left earth.

Interesting to note

[smooth wombat]

How the CEO indicates this is a failed mission. They didn't fail, they simply didn't complete the landing on the lunar surface.

Anything to save face and not bring dishonor to oneself or organization.

Re:Interesting to note

[Dutch Gun]

I'm not sure I see the mission in such binary terms. They were successful right up until they failed at the last step, which is still really impressive. "Our engineers will continue to investigate the situation," Hakamada said. "At this moment, what I can tell is we are very proud of the fact that we have already achieved many things during this mission 1."

They probably have a lot of telemetry and other data to sift through. Hopefully they figure out what went wrong and succeed in a subsequent try.

Failure is always an option.

[Virtucon]

Get back up, dust yourself off, climb out of the inevitable crater (pun intended) you are in and eventually figure out what went wrong.

I mean Blue Origin took nearly 8 months to explain what went wrong with their Sept '22 New Shepherd launch. [space.com]

Like explorers navigating the oceans without maps and a vague understanding of what those things in the sky were at night, getting into space and being successful are two different things; it's very hard and there were a lot of failures.

  "Old Sven left about a year ago, guess he's not coming back. I told him the world is flat! He just wouldn't listen. Oh well, at least now he won't find out about me banging his wife and I get all his sheep."

  Landing on another planetary body or moon is an order of magnitude harder.

Re:

[toddz]

It took Magellan 3 years to go around the globe. Sven's coming back and he's going to be pissed.

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[AmiMoJo]

They already plan to try again. Hopefully they can find out what happened from the available data.

Predictable

[93 Escort Wagon]

Didn't Richard Daystrom already admit that M1 through M4 were not entirely successful?

Sad. Was an inspiring effort.

[Eunomion]

Commercial space may need to really throw stuff at the Moon to see what sticks instead of doing rare attempts.

inspiration

[algaeman]

(Un)fortunately, it is very expensive to throw stuff at the moon. Once you pony up $60B for the venture, your opinion will be considered.

Re:

[Eunomion]

You seem to think it costs $60B, which is about two orders of magnitude away from reality. Seems not even you are considering your own opinion.

I watched it from 10:00 am cdt until the failure.

[Revek]

It definitely landed/crashed. They lost contact seconds before the landing. Too bad I was hoping they would pull it off.

Improved technology?

[sdinfoserv]

It seems odd we could do this, several times, 50 years ago with machines wrapped in tinfoil and computers with the screaming power of an abacus. And yet today, quantum computers, an interconnected real time global communication platform (aka internet), new elements, a completely decoded human genome, and still splat. I doubt I'll see fusion, interstellar travel, true AI (self aware singularity) or likely self driving cars in my lifetime... too bad.

Re:

[Ogive17]

Don't forget Kerbel Space Program

Re:

[Insanity Defense]

50 years ago there were "unlimited" national budgets and for the Apollo landings human intelligence on site for the landing. They also had their failures. Apollo 1 and 13 the Russian N1 rockets.

Re:

[thegarbz]

Nothing odd about it. You're making unfair comparisons. How much money did the USA spend on it space program when putting things on the moon? How many failures did they have? The issue here isn't computational complexity, never was. Advances in computers mean nothing to putting an object on the moon.

To give you hints about the questions I asked: The USA's answer ends in the suffix billions, while Ispace's answer ends in the suffix millions. For the second question it's impossible to do a direct comparison

Re:

[hackertourist]

Before Apollo 11...
- NASA launched 8 Pioneer missions, whose objective was to fly by the moon. All failed.
- NASA launched 9 Ranger missions, whose objective was to crash into the moon. 5 out of 9 failed.
- NASA launched 7 Surveyor missions, whose objective was to make a soft landing on the moon. 2 out of 7 failed.

Improved technology does not protect against design flaws, assembly errors, component failures, etc.

Re:

[CityZen]

Having lots of technology doesn't replace having lots of man-hours to do all the engineering work to make sure that every little piece of hardware is verified to be able to operate in conditions as close to "real" as possible.

Sure, you can buy a valve that should work to control the flow of some liquid. How much time will it take to guarantee (as much as possible) that the valve will work in space in zero-G for the liquid in question at the temperatures in question?

Aside from testing every individual piece