Spacecraft set for a high-stakes lunar landing attempt this week took months to reach the moon. Here’s why
New surface features of the moon have been discovered in a region called Mare Frigoris (outlined in teal). This composite image was taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
By Jackie Wattles, CNN
(CNN) — Nearly five months ago, a SpaceX rocket launched out of Florida carrying two lunar landers. The Blue Ghost spacecraft, from Texas-based Firefly Aerospace, zoomed to the moon, and in March it became the first robotic commercial vehicle to land upright on the lunar surface.
The other spacecraft, developed by Japan-based company Ispace, is just now arriving at its destination.
Resilience, as the uncrewed lunar lander is called, is on track to make its touchdown attempt at 3:24 p.m. ET on Thursday — three months after its rideshare buddy made history.
Ispace isn’t too concerned about losing out on a “first” superlative. And company executives said that taking a slow and steady path to the moon can offer Ispace some long-term advantages.
“What is good about this four- or five-month trajectory is, every day, there are small things that happen … something we didn’t expect,” Ispace Chief Financial Officer Jumpei Nozaki told CNN in January. “This (journey to the moon) is really a learning phase.”
Three teams of Ispace employees have been rotating in and out of the company’s mission control room in Tokyo, racking up months’ worth of practice in overseeing the unpredictable and daring physics of deep-space travel — a rare opportunity, the company’s founder and CEO, Takeshi Hakamada, told CNN.
Such a gradual approach to the moon does not, however, guarantee landing success.
Ispace’s first attempt to put a spacecraft on the lunar surface ended with a crash landing in April 2023 after a 4 ½-month journey from Earth.
Ultimately, Resilience’s long trajectory offers Ispace both pros and cons.
Getting to the moon in months, weeks or days
Resilience is on a path to the moon that’s often referred to as a low-energy transfer. It’s essentially a slow, cruising route — much like traveling to a friend’s house on a bike and coasting on the downhills, using little fuel or energy.
On such a path, the Resilience lander travels for hundreds of thousands of miles, soaring into deep space and waiting for the moon’s gravity to naturally capture the spacecraft into lunar orbit.
In contrast, other vehicles such as Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost and the Nova-C lander, developed by Texas-based company Intuitive Machines, have used large engines to fire themselves on a much more direct path. Intuitive Machines’ latest Nova-C lander, for example, reached the moon about a week after takeoff.
Compared with lunar landers developed by Ispace’s competitors, Resilience is lightweight and relatively cheap with a smaller rocket engine.
All the time Resilience spends in orbit allows mission operators to “verify many kinds of systems during this long journey,” such as the vehicle’s sensors, navigation and other software systems, Nozaki said.
But there are downsides, too.
And Nozaki said that, no matter the outcome of Resilience’s trip, Ispace will abandon the low-energy transfer approach with its third mission.
Ispace’s upcoming lunar lander, called Apex 1.0, will be flown in partnership with Massachusetts-based company Draper, under CLPS for the Artemis program, with the aim of taking a more direct route to the moon.
Reaching the moon quickly is also “really important for our customers,” Nozaki said.
These clients include research groups, companies and governments that pay Ispace to fly cargo such as science instruments on board the lunar lander.
Spending months in transit can put extra wear on instruments as they are exposed to the intense radiation environment and wild temperature swings of space before they begin operating on the lunar surface, according to Ispace.
What’s next for Ispace’s Resilience lander
Still, the company is hopeful a group of three science instruments currently on board Resilience will carry out exciting tests after the vehicle reaches the moon on Thursday.
Resilience is carrying a module designed to test algae-based food production, a deep-space radiation monitor and a water electrolyzer experiment, which is a device that aims to generate hydrogen and oxygen in the lunar environment.
Ispace’s first lunar lander was descending toward the Atlas crater, a feature on the northeast side of the moon’s near face, when it crashed in April 2023. This go-around, the company is aiming to land in a different lunar location: a 750-mile-long (1,200-kilometer) plain called Mare Frigoris — or the “Sea of Cold” — which lies in the moon’s far northern reaches.
Mare Frigoris is significantly flatter than the Atlas crater region, potentially offering easier-to-navigate terrain. Ispace said in a statement that the new landing site was chosen because it offers “flexibility.”
The company plans to livestream Thursday’s touchdown attempt on YouTube and X.
If Resilience lands upright, Ispace will become the first commercial company outside of the US to pull off such a feat. Ispace would also join Firefly, whose Blue Ghost lander made a pristine landing in March, in becoming the only two companies to complete a fully successful touchdown of a robotic lunar lander.
Intuitive Machines has landed two vehicles on the moon, both in the vicinity of the lunar south pole. Each of those spacecraft landed on its side, however, limiting the science and research the company could carry out.
Both Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines are contractors for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, initiative, which is part of the space agency’s Artemis program — a framework under which NASA plans to return humans to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. Robotic missions carried out under CLPS are meant to serve as scientific pathfinders, paving the way for astronauts’ return.
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