SpaceX postpones Japanese moon lander launch again
SPACEX on Wednesday (Dec 1) postponed the launch of the world’s first private lander to the Moon, a mission undertaken by Japanese firm ispace.
A Falcon 9 rocket was scheduled to blast off at 3.37 am (0837 GMT) on Thursday from Cape Canaveral in the US state of Florida, but SpaceX said further checks on the vehicle had led to a delay. This was after the launch had already been postponed by a day due to the need for additional pre-flight checks, said SpaceX and ispace.
SpaceX tweeted: “After further inspections of the launch vehicle and data review, we’re standing down from tomorrow’s launch of @ispace_inc’s Hakuto-R Mission 1; a new target launch date will be shared once confirmed.”
The mission by ispace is the first of a programme called Hakuto-R.
The lander will touch down around April 2023 on the visible side of the Moon, in the Atlas crater, said the company.
Measuring just over 2 m by 2.5 m, the lander carries on board a 10-kg rover named Rashid, built by the United Arab Emirates.
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The oil-rich country is a newcomer to the space race, but it counts sending a probe into Mars’ orbit last year among its recent successes. If the project succeeds, Rashid will be the Arab world’s first Moon mission.
Until now, only the United States, Russia and China have managed to put a robot on the lunar surface.
“We have achieved so much in the six short years since we first began conceptualising this project in 2016,” said ispace chief executive Takeshi Hakamada.
Hakuto – the name of the team that eventually formed ispace – was one of five finalists in the international Google Lunar XPrize competition, a challenge to land a rover on the Moon before a 2018 deadline. The contest ended without a winner, but some of the projects are still ongoing.
Another finalist, from the Israeli organisation SpaceIL, failed in April 2019 to become the first privately-funded mission to achieve the feat, after crashing into the surface while attempting to land.
Japan’s ispace, which has just 200 employees, says it “aims to extend the sphere of human life into space and create a sustainable world by providing high-frequency, low-cost transportation services to the Moon”. AFP
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