A boxy, 7.5-foot-tall spacecraft is making its final approach to the moon, where it will make history—if it touches down safely. It’s poised to be the first commercial lander to set its robotic feet there, with competitors sure to follow.
The Tokyo-based company Ispace lofted its M1 lander on December 11, 2022. After tracing a roundabout, energy-efficient trajectory, it’s expected to reach the surface of Atlas Crater on the southeastern outer edge of Mare Frigoris at about 12:40 pm Eastern time Tuesday, which is 1:40 am Wednesday morning in Japan. (“Moon time” is not a thing yet.) Sticking the landing would make Ispace a leading player in a nascent lunar aerospace industry, as many companies, mostly based in the US, are planning their own landers, rovers, and payloads.
“We are the first commercial lunar lander, and I’m really happy with this,” says Ryo Ujiie, Ispace’s chief technology officer. “The important thing is to complete this mission and learn from it.”
Technically, Ispace isn’t making the first attempt to set down a private craft on the moon. In 2019, the nonprofit Israeli organization SpaceIL sent a privately funded lander called Beresheet, but it crashed, along with a payload that included human DNA samples and thousands of tardigrades, tiny “water bears” that can survive almost anywhere.
The Ispace lander comes equipped with a large, 400-Newton thruster and six additional thrusters, enabling a controlled descent to the surface. With those thrusters, the navigation system, and four landing legs, Ujiie hopes the craft will achieve a soft touchdown. The company chose its landing site so that engineers at mission control in Tokyo will be able to maintain visual contact and communication with the lander.
While this mission is a technology demonstration, M1 will arrive carrying payloads, including 360-degree cameras from a Canadian company and rovers from the Japanese space agency and the United Arab Emirates.
The Ispace lander snapped a photo of the moon while in lunar orbit.
Courtesy of iSpace
Soon, the Ispace lander will have plenty of company. Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic will be sending its Peregrine lander on the debut flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, which could launch in June. Houston-based Intuitive Machines plans to send two Nova-C landers to the moon this year, with another slated for 2024. Other companies, like Firefly Aerospace and Draper, have their own landers heading there in the next couple years. SpaceIL will make another attempt, sending Beresheet 2 in 2025. And Astrobotic and Ispace are already looking ahead toward more ambitious landers to follow their initial designs.
After years of hype, the commercial lunar market finally appears to be getting off the ground—and there seems to be enough customer demand for payload spots to keep the fledgling industry growing. For example, Astrobotic’s first lander will carry payloads from 16 clients. Among them are small robots from the Mexican space agency, a radiation detector from the German Aerospace Center, and Carnegie Mellon University’s MoonArk, an artistic project somewhat akin to the Golden Records aboard the Voyager spacecraft. Firefly’s first lander, called Blue Ghost, will bring two payloads from Honeybee Robotics (acquired last year by Blue Origin), including an instrument called the Lunar PlanetVac for sampling the soil and a device from Aegis Aerospace that will assess how bits of regolith stick to material surfaces.
“I think this is a signal of a strong market. I wish for success not only for our own missions but also for our competitors,” says Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines’s chief technology officer. Successful lunar missions could also eventually set the stage for commercial Martian landers, he says.
Still, although there are a growing number of private clients for space shipping, the expanding market is significantly driven by NASA through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. About twice a year, NASA has been putting out calls for bids to deliver a science payload—or occasionally a technology development one—that it wants shipped to a specific lunar location by a certain date. Companies then bid on those transportation services. In 2019, NASA tapped Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines for such deliveries, and later this year one of them will make the program’s first lunar drop. Each order is worth about $100 million on average, and NASA’s agreements so far total about $1 billion, says deputy program manager Ryan Stephan. One of the ultimate goals, he says, is to help jump-start this new industry. “We focus today on the science return of our missions, but an important benefit of the project is developing this commercial lunar economy,” he says.
NASA’s biggest CLPS contract by far, worth about $330 million, will involve bringing the agency’s Viper lunar rover to the moon’s south pole in November 2024. That job is going to Astrobotic’s Griffin, its successor to Peregrine and the largest lander of the bunch.
Firefly’s second Blue Ghost will haul NASA’s LuSEE-Night, a low-frequency radio telescope, to the far side of the moon in 2026. It will also deploy the European Space Agency’s Lunar Pathfinder communications satellite into moon orbit.
While there’s no connection between CLPS and NASA’s Artemis program—which is focused on crewed missions, not robotic ones—some CLPS payloads will supplement the agency’s long-term plans for a human base on the moon. That includes the Viper rover, plus gear for a lunar ice mining experiment to be carried by Intuitive Machines’ second lander this year.
Working with NASA can mean big contracts, but because it’s a government agency, there are also some strings attached. For example, NASA has “planetary protection” rules that demand that its own spacecraft be scrubbed and scrutinized to avoid stowaway microorganisms that could contaminate other worlds. (The rules for Mars are much tougher than for the moon, since’s Mars is more likely to have once hosted life.) Commercial spacecraft in NASA partnerships must also get licenses from the Federal Aviation Administration and Federal Communications Commission, and that review process includes considering planetary protection, Stephan says.
As the moon becomes a more popular visiting spot, there will surely be a more concerted effort to assess lunar resources, mine water ice, and extract oxygen for fuel. Perhaps in the 2030s, lunar ice could be utilized for propellant for spacecraft en route to Mars and beyond. The limited quantity of ice could eventually pose ethical concerns, if these nonrenewable resources are quickly exhausted or if mining them damages the lunar environment. But for now, these early commercial missions look like the beginning of an ice mining bonanza—and Ispace aims to be a part of that endeavor, Ujiie says. “Our main interest is in the water,” he says. “If we can access those water resources, the moon would be like a space gas station.”
Update 4-25-2023 4 pm ET: Update: The lander appears to have reached the moon’s surface at the expected time, but Ispace mission control has lost contact with it. The vehicle sent flight data just before the expected landing, but the company hasn’t been able do determine its status since then. It’s not clear yet whether the craft survived the landing. “We will never quit,” founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada told the crowd that had gathered to watch the landing, noting that the company is already planning a second and third mission. You can see the livestream of the landing here.
