JAPAN landed its first ever probe on the Moon, in a drive to overcome a year of setbacks in space, but the status of the lander was not immediately clear.

The SLIM lander, nicknamed “Moon sniper,” touched down about 20 minutes past midnight Japan time on Saturday morning (Jan 20). Designed to land within 100 metres of its target, the lightweight lander was launched in September by the H2-A heavy payload rocket co-developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The lander reached the surface, according to JAXA, but the agency could not immediately verify the condition the lander was in. JAXA ended its live broadcast without confirming the status of SLIM but plans to update reporters at an upcoming press conference.

A successful soft landing – in which a spacecraft is brought to a controlled stop – of the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon would put Japan in exclusive company, with just the US, USSR, China and India managing the feat already.

Exclusion from the elite club has been a sore point for Japan, which beat arch-rival China in launching its first satellite in 1970 but has since taken a back seat to a series of high-profile Chinese space successes. That includes the world’s first ever soft landing on the far side of the Moon in 2019, and landing on Mars in 2021.

India has eclipsed Japan, too, succeeding in a second attempt last August by landing near the lunar south pole. While the Americans and Soviets sent spacecraft to the Moon during the Cold War, the US and Russia have struggled trying to return: Russia’s Luna-25 crashed last August, and a NASA-backed mission from Pittsburgh startup Astrobotic Technology failed this month.

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For Japan, landing on the Moon has been even tougher to crack. Its space agency, JAXA, lost contact with a lunar lander in late 2022, while Tokyo-based Ispace also suffered a communication failure with a craft bound for the Moon last April.

Other setbacks include the botched debut of JAXA’s H3 heavy-lift rocket, which failed after takeoff last March and hasn’t flown since. Meanwhile, JAXA’s smaller Epsilon rocket is grounded, too, following an explosion in October 2022.

Lunar lander

The potential for SLIM to target more specific landing sites should also help future efforts to explore for resources such as water and potentially increase demand for lunar missions, Takeshi Hakamada, Ispace founder and chief executive officer, said in an interview Friday.

Big Japanese companies have already joined the push to build the country’s space-faring clout. Toyota Motor is JAXA’s partner in developing a lunar rover and Honda Motor is working with the agency to design a system to produce oxygen, hydrogen and electricity on the Moon. Ispace’s list of corporate partners includes Japan Airlines, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance and Citizen Watch.

A successful lunar landing would also improve JAXA’s standing as the government finalises a plan to give the agency a pot of 1 trillion (S$9.1 billion) over 10 years to support space businesses and researchers.

“In Japan, there’s a strong consensus that there’s a big Moon economy that’s about to develop in the coming decades,” said Luigi Scatteia, leader of PwC Advisory’s global space practice. “The country wants to be one of the pioneers in exploiting that.”

Closer to home, Japan needs JAXA to play a bigger security role in space, and earlier this month the agency added to the country’s network of spy satellites. The government wants to increase the size of the country’s orbital fleet to keep up with neighbours, including China, which is second only to the US in the number of spy satellites in orbit.

“There is definitely a race for space technologies” in the region, said Saadia Pekkanen, director of the Space Law, Data and Policy Program at the University of Washington. “For Japan, these realities mean even greater reinforcement of its space-based surveillance and communication capabilities for military purposes.” BLOOMBERG