On Sunday, a spacecraft owned by a Japanese start-up was sent toward the moon in the nation’s first-ever lunar mission and the first of its type by a private firm.
After two delays for further pre-flight inspections, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched the rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida, the US. Live coverage of the launch revealed that the spacecraft, built by the Tokyo-based firm ispace, took off on a Falcon 9 rocket at 2:38am. Takeshi Hakamada, the startup’s CEO, stated that our first mission will establish the foundation for releasing the moon’s potential and developing it into a rich and thriving economic system.
Only the United States, Russia, and China have been able to successfully land a robot on the moon thus far. The first mission of a programme dubbed Hakuto-R, which is Japanese for “white rabbit,” is the iSpace mission.
The business predicted that their lunar lander will land on the Moon’s surface in April 2023, which is the Japanese year of the rabbit. The spacecraft, which measures little over two by 2.5 metres, is carrying a 10-kilogram United Arab Emirates-built rover as part of its payload.
Although the Gulf nation is a recent participant in the space race, it just launched a spacecraft into Mars’ orbit. The Rashid would be the first lunar mission for the Arab world if it landed successfully.
The Google Lunar XPrize competition to send a rover to the moon by the year 2018 had five finalists, but there was no winner. Hakuto was one of them.
The Japanese rock band Sakanaction’s song “SORATO,” which was initially recorded in support of the Google competition, is also included on the disc that the ispace lunar lander is transporting together with two robots made by the Japanese space agency.
Another contender in the competition, the Israeli organisation SpaceIL, failed in April 2019 to make history by being the first privately-funded mission to land on the moon when its lander collided with the lunar surface.