The Japanese private spaceflight company ispace aims to make history on Thursday (June 5) with its second attempt to land on the moon.
The Resilience lander is currently orbiting the moon as it prepares to land within Mare Frigoris (“Sea of Cold”) in the northern hemisphere. The landing is scheduled for Thursday at 3:17 p.m. EDT (1917 GMT; or 4:17 a.m. Japan Standard Time on Friday, June 6), ispace announced today (June 4). This is seven minutes earlier than previously stated, after engineers fine-tuned orbital calculations.
You’ll be able to watch the landing attempt live via ispace, and Space.com will carry the company’s livestream. Should ispace decide to switch to an alternative landing site, the Resilience landing would shift to different landing dates and times, the company stated on social media.
Resilience is ispace’s second lunar lander and has been on a long, circuitous route to the moon after launch on Jan. 15 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is a follow-up to the failed Hakuto-R Mission 1 landing attempt back in 2023, and is also part of a wider surge in private lunar exploration efforts that have seen a number of recent commercial landing attempts.
A successful landing would mark Japan’s first private spacecraft to safely reach the lunar surface and only the third commercial success globally, signaling growing momentum in commercial exploration of Earth’s nearest neighbor.
Ready for descent
Resilience is currently in a circular orbit 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the moon. At around 2:20 p.m. EDT (1840 GMT) on Thursday, an hour before landing, it will automatically fire its main engine, reducing altitude and velocity as it begins its fully autonomous landing attempt.
Resilience, which is 7.5 feet (2.3 meters) tall and 8.5 feet (2.6 m) wide, is targeting Mare Frigoris, a vast, relatively smooth basaltic plain in the moon’s northern hemisphere.
Resilience weighed roughly 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) when fully fueled and is based on the same Hakuto-R hardware as Mission 1, but features software updates using lessons learned from the earlier failed landing. An altitude sensor in Mission 1 mistook the rim of a crater for the lunar surface, causing the lander to shut down its engines early, while it was still, in reality, around 3.1 miles (5 km) above the moon.
Founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada said that ispace stands ready to make history, building on the experience of Hakuto-R Mission 1.
“While the mission achieved significant results, we lost communication with the lander just before touchdown,” Hakamada said in a June 4 statement. “Since that time, we have drawn on the experience, using it as motivation to move forward with resolve. We are now at the dawn of our next attempt to make history.”
Post-landing plans
Resilience is attempting to make more than a statement with its landing. The solar-powered lander carries five science payloads, including a micro moon rover named Tenacious, which was developed by ispace’s Luxembourg-based subsidiary, and carries payloads for commercial partners.
Tenacious sports a high-definition, forward-mounted camera and a small shovel for collecting samples. Resilience is also packing a water electrolyzer experiment, an algae-based food production module, and a deep space radiation probe from Taiwan that could contribute to future crewed mission safety.
Also aboard are a commemorative alloy plate based on the “Charter of the Universal Century,” a fictional document from the popular Japanese science fiction franchise Gundam; a UNESCO memory disk preserving linguistic and cultural diversity; and a “Moonhouse” artwork aboard Tenacious.
If Resilience lands successfully, it is expected to operate for up to two weeks (one lunar day) on the moon’s surface before succumbing to the deep cold of lunar night. The European Space Agency’s ESTRACK ground network will support communication between the lander and ispace’s Mission Control Center in Tokyo.
The mission is also part of a grander ispace vision. The pioneering company is focused on developing robotic landers and lunar rovers with the overarching goal of expanding humanity’s presence beyond Earth and building a sustainable cislunar economy.
The company was established as White Label Space in 2010 by Hakamada, before changing its name to ispace in 2013. The company competed in the Google Lunar X Prize competition, and though it did not undertake a lunar mission, it continued its lander work after the X Prize’s 2018 end. Headquartered in Tokyo, ispace also operates offices in the United States and Luxembourg.
Resilience is the latest in a flurry of lunar landing activity. Since ispace’s first landing attempt in 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-3 has successfully touched down, Japan’s SLIM lander made a successful yet lopsided landing, China’s Chang’e 6 collected the first samples from the far side of the moon, and Russia’s Luna 25 crashed into the moon.
While these were national efforts, a series of private landing attempts have also been made, demonstrating a far greater, more competitive context for lunar science and exploration.
In early 2024, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander suffered a mission-ending failure early in its flight, followed by Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus landing on the moon but tipping over. Firefly Aerospace’s first Blue Ghost lander — which launched with Resilience on the same Falcon 9 rocket in January — made the second-ever private landing in early March in Mare Crisium. Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 Athena lander made a historic landing near the south pole a few days later but toppled over in doing so.
Whether Resilience lands safely or not, ispace is forging ahead. Its next mission, set for 2026, will debut a larger lander, Apex 1.0, aimed at expanding Japan’s role in the growing lunar economy.