The first lunar landing of the year was a huge success. The second is not that much. Now, the third commercial moon lander has entered orbit around the moon ahead of its chance of glory next month.
Japanese ISPACE’s Hakuto-R Lander Resilience is about to touch the Lunar Dirt following the landing of the American company Firefly Aerospace, followed by an intuitive machine with a blue ghost lander and its lander named Athena.
A Tokyo-based private company announced that Resilience had successfully made its lunar orbit late Tuesday. A landing attempt is planned by June 5th.
“We are extremely proud of the crew who successfully managed to make the most important operations and enter the lunar orbit,” said Hakamada, founder and CEO of Ispace in a press release. “We will continue to carry out careful operation and thorough preparation to ensure a successful lunar landing.”
Blue Ghost and Athena flew as part of NASA’s commercial Lunar Payload Services program, and Blue Ghost was the most successful ever. Athena Lander suffered a more difficult landing a few days later, and the mission was declared soon after a touchdown.
A similar fate came in 2023 when the intuitive machine Odysseus Lander became the first commercial company to successfully make a soft landing on the moon, despite limiting its usefulness.
A venture from iSpace, which has no ties with NASA, is its second attempt at soft landing after a similar lander crashed to the surface in 2023.
Only about half of all moon soft landing attempts, including Apollo’s six crew missions, have been successful.
Resilience was launched in January by the Kennedy Space Center as a secondary payload mounted on the SpaceX Falcon 9, which launched Blue Ghost Lander. A much longer fuel-compensated trip was required before entering the lunar orbit. Using gravity assist instead of fuel, the path traveled over 680,000 miles from Earth before moving its trajectory back to the moon.
The plan is to try and land at Mare Frigoris, far north of the moon, as seen from the Northern Hemisphere.
On board is a small rover named Tenaiss, designed by Luxembourg-based Ispace Europe, and five other commercial science and commemorative payloads.
