Japan’s Ispace Sets November Target for Moon Launch

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Japanese aerospace company Ispace Inc. is targeting next month for its first robotic lunar mission, called M1, which will send a lander and two small rovers to the surface of the moon.

If successful, Ispace will become the first private company to land a spacecraft intact on the lunar surface. In a statement, the company said it's targeting a launch between Nov. 9 and Nov. 15 for its M1 mission.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket will launch Ispace's hardware from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying its M1 lander into space. The lander will then journey the rest of the way to the moon.

The mission is part of Ispace's HAKUTO-R program, which came about from a now-defunct competition by Google that began in 2007. The contest challenged teams to send the first privately-funded spacecraft to the moon's surface with an eye on reducing the cost of lunar travel. The competition concluded without a winner in 2018 when none of the teams achieved a launch.

With its new launch date, Ispace is poised to beat two US companies -- Astrobotic Technology Inc. and Intuitive Machines LLC -- to become the first private company to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon. Both Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines were awarded NASA contracts through the space agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program to send payloads to the moon. The US companies don't plan to launch their landers until 2023.

In partnership with Draper, Ispace also holds a contract with NASA to send payloads to the far side of the moon by 2025.

Another team from the Google-backed competition, the Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL, attempted to land the first privately funded spacecraft on the Moon in 2019, but it came in too fast and crashed into the lunar surface.