In the 2020s, the Japanese had already attempted to deliver moon rovers and other payloads to Selena. However, one of the vehicles, in the private Hakuto mission, crashed, and the second landed upside down, which did not allow him to implement a scientific program. The second landing by the same private company that sent the first Hakuto mission did not go according to plan either.
The Stability spacecraft, as part of the Hakuto-R mission of the Japanese private company ispace, attempted a soft landing on the Moon at 22:17 Moscow time. But in the process, the connection with him was lost. Two previous attempts by Japanese space players, both public and private, to land their vehicles on Selena also encountered significant difficulties. The dimensions of the "Stability" are 2.3 meters high, 2.3 meters wide, and weigh 340 kilograms. In fact, we are talking about a demonstration mission: after the loss of the ispace of the first Hakuto mission in 2023, it is important first to make sure that the development company can properly land a scientific payload on the surface of Selenium. Below you can watch the video of the landing attempt.:
In the last minutes before the scheduled landing, the telemetry showed a significant outstanding vehicle speed. And at the moment when the connection was cut off, its height above the lunar surface was minus 233 meters. Given the circumstances, it could have been the bottom of the lunar Sea of Cold, the intended landing site of the device. While maintaining significant speed near the surface, it should have crashed. On the other hand, if the telemetry was wrong, he has a chance of survival.
Sustainability was supposed to deliver a miniature five-kilogram lunar rover TENACIOUS, created in Luxembourg, to the Sea of Cold, at the 60th degree north latitude of the Moon. This is the first Western European lunar rover, and it is also a kind of technology demonstrator. Moving on the moon is not easy, and the rover would have to demonstrate that it can handle such a task. In addition, there was a symbolic load on board the Stability: a device for heating food in a vacuum, a model of a Western European house, and the like.
The face of one of the ispace engineers in the last minutes before the moon landing, a screenshot from an online broadcast. Apparently, he also noticed the significant speed of the device where he should have already extinguished it.
Image source: ispace, YouTube
Moon landings are extremely difficult, and even our country, which was the first to achieve this in February 1966 (Luna-9), had failed several attempts in a row before. Not so long ago, Russia tried to repeat the lunar landing (Luna-25), but the device crashed due to incorrect operation of the braking system. Ispace now has the experience of two unsuccessful landings in a row — unlike the Japanese space agency JAXA, where the lunar vehicle landed gently, albeit upside down. This will make it more difficult for her to receive further orders in the market. However, some niche for companies like ispace may remain after that: the dislike of European countries for ordering missions from SpaceX is well known.
The flight scheme of the "Stability" to the Moon was quite unusual: having taken off in January 2025, the mission followed the most energy-efficient, but for the same reason, time-consuming orbit.
Image source: ispace
The landing point at ispace was not the most promising one. As Naked Science has already written, in the light of modern views on the formation of the Moon, the most interesting part of it is at the poles, north and south, where water ice is expected to be found in the ground and a number of indications of exactly how the Earth's satellite originated. It is possible that there are lenses of liquid water under an icy "lid" under the poles at a certain depth, although in the first missions, of course, they will not be able to reach them.
But in the case of a landing at 80 degrees north or south latitude and above, communication would be difficult: there is almost no line of sight between the circumpolar regions of the Moon and the Earth (except for the peaks of "eternal light" that are inconvenient for landing). To make sure that everything happened as it should, the developers this time chose the relatively low latitudes of the satellite, where communication with the Earth is easiest. The estimated operating time of the mission is initially quite short, and its vehicles are not equipped with heaters to survive the moonlit night. Alas, this resource of the mission, apparently, may remain unclaimed.
Alexander Berezin
