Private Japanese lunar lander makes descent to surface of the moon, but fate is unknown

Four-and-a-half months after launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket, a privately-built Japanese robotic lander attempted to touch down on the moon Thursday, but communications were lost at or near the moment it was expected to settle to the surface, leaving flight controllers in the dark about its fate.

Amateur radio experts who monitor signals from various spacecraft were tracking the Resilient lander and shared data indicating the vehicle may have been descending too fast for a safe touchdown. Ispace, the Tokyo-headquartered company that built Resilient, ended its landing webcast without any update on the spacecraft’s condition.

The landing attempt came two years after ispace’s first lander malfunctioned, ran out of gas and crashed to the lunar surface. With Resilient, ispace was attempting to become only the second private company to land a probe on the moon after Austin-based Firefly Aerospace successfully landed its Blue Ghost on the lunar surface in March.

Carrying cameras, a few science payloads, a tiny rover and even an art project, Resilient fired its thrusters just after 2:10 p.m. EDT to begin the 66-minute descent from a 62-mile-high circular orbit to touchdown near the center of Mare Frigoris — the Sea of Cold — in the moon’s northern hemisphere at 60 degrees north latitude.

All appeared to be going smoothly when, around 3:17 p.m. — the projected landing time — telemetry suddenly ceased. The ispace landing webcast showed flight controllers in Tokyo huddled around computer monitors, looking for indications in the telemetry that Resilient had survived. There were no smiles or applause, and the atmosphere appeared somber.

“At this moment, we have not yet been able to establish communication with Resilience, but ispace engineers in our Mission Control Center are continuing to work to contact the lander,” the company posted on X just after 5 p.m.

“We will share an update with the latest information in a media announcement in the next few hours. Thank you for your patience — please check back with us soon.”

The primary goals of the mission were to land on the moon and deploy the small micro rover Tenacious. The rover, in turn, carried the art project, a tiny model of a Swedish house, designed by artist Mikael Genberg. The traditionally styled red-and-white house measures just 4.7 inches long, 4 inches high and weighs just 3.5 ounces.

Asked why he took on the project, which required years of planning, fundraising and engineering, Genberg said “we have done as human beings things from time to time that (do not) seemingly have a purpose beyond just being creative.”

“The Eiffel Tower, for instance, I mean it’s a stupid thing to build,” he said. “Today, it has a purpose as maybe the most important thing to make Paris the most visited city in the world.”

While the “moonhouse” could survive for thousands if not millions of years in the airless environment of the moon, its custom paint was expected to fade in the sun’s harsh radiation, and lunar dust will slowly coat its surface. Genberg joked that he would happily await an invitation to repaint it.

The flight plan called for the moonhouse to be dropped from the rover a few days after landing. The cost of the project was not disclosed, but a spokesman said it was similar to what one might pay for a relatively large house on Earth.

Ispace is one of a handful of companies attempting to provide non-government transportation services to the moon for a variety of payloads ranging from science instruments to technology demonstrations.

But as it turns out, getting low-cost spacecraft to the moon’s surface is extremely difficult.

Ispace tried and failed in 2023 when its first lander ran out of propellant nearing the surface, dropping to a “hard” crash landing. Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology launched its Peregrine lander in January 2024, but the spacecraft suffered a propulsion system leak and never made it to the moon.

Houston-based Intuitive Machines successfully put two landers down on the lunar surface in 2024, and again earlier this year, but both spacecraft tipped over on touchdown. While each one survived its landing, neither was able to accomplish all of its pre-flight objectives.

Before Thursday, only Firefly Aerospace had successfully touched down and carried out its mission, landing the Blue Ghost spacecraft on March 2, 53 years after the final Apollo mission.

Resilience and Blue Ghost were launched atop a single SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 15. The Blue Ghost lander took a direct route to the moon and carried out a successful touchdown, operating for a full two-week lunar “day.”

Resilience followed a longer, low-energy trajectory that carried it well past its target, using the moon’s gravity to bring it back to an initially elliptical orbit and finally, using its thrusters, to the 62-mile circular orbit that set the stage for descent.