Watch ispace attempt to land on the moon for the first time
After five long months journeying through space, ispace’s Hakuto-R lander is ready to greet the lunar surface.
The Japanese company is expecting to land Hakuto-R at 9:40 AM Pacific time today. If successful, this first mission will no doubt be a huge boon for ispace’s ambitious plans to send two subsequent landers to the moon in 2024 and 2025.
It would also make them the first private company to land on the moon, and the first spacecraft from Japan to do so. (China, the United States and the USSR have been the only nations to reach the lunar surface.)
This first mission, appropriately named Mission 1, kicked off last December when a SpaceX Falcon 9 launched the lander into space. Since then, the lander has performed a number of maneuvers to stay on track in its path to the moon.
Image Credits: ispace
At its farthest point, Hakuto-R traveled as much as 1.4 million kilometers from Earth. This is the farthest any privately funded, commercially operated spacecraft has traveled into space.
While Mission 1 is largely a technical demonstration, Hakuto-R is not flying solo: Inside, it’s carrying customer payloads from NASA and the United Arab Emirates; the UAE’s payload, a small rover, will be the country’s first craft to visit the lunar surface.
But ispace doesn’t just want to be a payload delivery provider. The Tokyo-based company also wants to deliver satellites to lunar orbit and longer term, to pioneer a full-fledged lunar economy.
The livestream will kick-off one hour prior to landing at 8:40 AM Pacific. Watch it below:
