- Japanese space firm's planned moon landing concludes unsuccessfully
Welp, that didn't go as planned! Ispace's moon-bound baby, Resilience, took a tumble instead of a touchdown on June 5, 2025. The space stork's final push was plagued with issues throughout the critical landing phase. Ground control reckoned they triggered the engines to slow things down for the little fella, but shortly after that, they lost contact.
According to Takeshi Hakamada, the CEO of Ispace, they had a close call with vertical alignment, but the will to reach for the moon just wasn't enough for our space pal, Resilience. They sadly couldn't confirm a successful landing.
What seems to have sunk our cosmic explorer was an apparent malfunction that prevented it from slowing down properly for a soft landing. Ispace later released a statement, asserting that the lander crashed into the lunar surface at a pace faster than what was required for a soft touchdown.
The epic accident took place in the Mare Frigoris, a chilly, high-altitude region on the moon. Ispace had aimed to make a splash by becoming the first non-US company to nab a lunar landing, and this was their second attempt at it. Their first moon-bound craft crashed into the lunar surface in April 2023.
A couple of months before this unfortunate mishap, Resilience had hitchhiked its way to space aboard a Falcon-9 rocket from SpaceX's Cape Canaveral spaceport. Along for the ride was the US company Firefly Aerospace's lunar lander, Blue Ghost, which successfully touched down in the Mons Latreille volcanic structure in Mare Crisium on the northeastern moon's surface in early March.
Firefly Aerospace furthered the legacy of Intuitive Machines, a Texas-based company that scored a private lunar landing last year. However, their Odysseus lander ended up toppling over after landing in April 2024, only managing to carry out a partial survey.
Other than a handful of government space agencies, only a select few have successfully touched down on the moon. The Soviet Union started the trend in 1966, swiftly followed by the US, China, India, and Japan. Japan's space agency JAXA scored a soft landing with the probe Slim in January 2024.
Resilience was armed with various scientific instruments and the mini-rover Tenacious, developed by Ispace Europe, a Luxembourg-based subsidiary. The rover was supposed to crawl around on the lunar surface, click some pictures, and collect moon rocks for lab analysis.
Ispace is now investigating the root cause of the failure to improve future lunar landings. Fingers crossed for better luck next time!
The planned moon landing by Ispace, a Japanese space company, failed on June 5, 2025, due to an apparent malfunction which prevented the lander, Resilience, from slowing down for a soft landing. This hiccup in space-and-astronomy technology marks a setback for Ispace's aspirations to become the first non-US company to confirm a successful lunar landing, a goal that was previously undermined by their first moon-bound craft crashing into the lunar surface in April 2023.
