Japan’s RESILIENCE spacecraft faces hurdles in ispace’s second Moon landing attempt
On June 6, 2025, beginning at 3:13 a.m. GMT+9, the Japanese space company ispace’s RESILIENCE lunar lander attempted to land on the Moon for its second attempt for a lunar landing. The lander was scheduled to attempt its landing in the Mare Frigoris region around 3:17 a.m. GMT+9 but encountered challenges during its terminal descent phase—the final phase of engine burn before touching down on the lunar surface.
With the mission placeholder name of Hakuto-R Mission 2, this mission aimed to demonstrate the company’s capabilities to transport payloads and experiments to the Moon while ensuring the best possible outcome through the lessons learned on its first Hakuto-R mission, which also failed on its landing attempt.
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Brief Mission History
Hitching a ride aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on January 15, 2025, along with the Blue Ghost Mission 1 by Firefly Aerospace, the lunar lander went its separate way by initiating a low-energy transfer trajectory, allowing the spacecraft to reach lunar orbit with reduced propulsion requirements. After a series of deep-space manoeuvres and “successes,” as the company calls its achievements, the lunar lander entered lunar orbit on May 7, 2025. The spacecraft then further closed in on our celestial neighbor by entering a circular 100 km lunar orbit around the Moon on May 28, 2025.
Landing Timeline
The official data began to come in during the livestream approximately 12 minutes before touchdown—marking the start of the braking burn phase. This braking burn allowed the spacecraft to lower its 100 km circular orbit toward the landing site. At this point, all thrusters, namely one main thruster and six assist thrusters, were still functioning.
At approximately 2 minutes and 30 seconds before landing, the pitch-up phase officially began, allowing the spacecraft to orient itself upward slowly. All thrusters were still operating normally.
Between T-2:15 and T-1:50 before landing, the telemetry occasionally dropped out—with some auxiliary engines turning on and off intermittently. Even the main engine shut off at one point but subsequently came back on. Engine thrust was observed to fluctuate and increase, as indicated by the graphics. The speed was observed to increase at some point rather than decrease while the altitude continued to decline. This anomalous data could be due to signal dropout, though, as things returned to normal for a brief period after this.
Approximately 1 minute and 55 seconds before landing, telemetry indicated that all engines were operating normally again at a speed of 219 km/h and an altitude of 606 m. This telemetry continued for 1 minute and 50 seconds, during which time it appeared that the altitude was too low, but the speed was still too fast.
The last known normal telemetry data was received approximately 1 minute and 45 seconds before landing, indicating that the vehicle was traveling at 187 km/h with an altitude of 52 m, with all engines shut off. Telemetry was then lost, and the altitude entered a deep dive, even reaching an anomalous reading of -223m.
This moment marked the end of the mission, but ispace took a long time to confirm the official end as they continued to attempt to connect and re-establish a stable connection with the lander—with no success.
Reason of Failure
ispace has issued an official statement regarding the possible cause of the mission’s failure, which states that the laser rangefinder system—the system used to measure the lander’s altitude—experienced delays in obtaining valid measurements. As a result, the lander wasn’t able to decelerate quickly enough due to the latency in data—resulting in a high-speed crash on the lunar surface.
After communications were lost with mission control, ispace attempted to re-establish contact with the lander by sending a command to reboot it and re-establish a connection with Earth—with no success.
Mission Payloads
If it had succeeded, RESILIENCE could have been the second entirely successful commercial lunar landing and also the second successful Japanese lunar lander to be preceded by the SLIM lander. Aside from this supposed success, the lunar lander was not only designed to operate independently but also planned to carry various payloads toward the Moon, each serving multiple purposes.
Each of these payloads could have contributed to the efforts made to help this mission serve its purpose through space research and human inspiration.
1.) Tenacious Rover: Developed by their subsidiary, ispace-EUROPE, in Luxembourg, this micro-rover was designed to navigate around the landing site and learn more about various aspects of the Moon, particularly the lunar regolith (lunar soil). It could collect lunar samples using a shovel. A high-definition, forward-mounted camera was used to capture these samples, and the imagery was relayed back to the lander and then to mission control on Earth.
1.1) Moonhouse: Designed by artist Mikael Genberg, this was a small, red house in a Swedish-style white. The background behind the making of this mini house was an artistic and epic story that Mikael had envisioned for 25 years. The Moonhouse was to be strapped onboard the TENACIOUS rover.
1.2) Memory Disk: Provided by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), this memory disk contained recordings of 275 languages and other cultural artifacts. It was to be on board the RESILIENCE lander, which would have served as a cultural artifact in its own right, preserving linguistic and cultural diversity as a significant part of humanity on the lunar surface.
2.) Water Electrolyzer Experiment: Provided by Takasago Thermal Engineering Co., this experiment aimed to test in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) by using lunar water as a resource for hydrogen and oxygen, which are vital for the survival and return of astronauts from other celestial bodies, such as future missions to the Moon or Mars.
3.) Algae-Based Food Production Experiment: Provided by Euglena Co., this module aimed to experiment with food production on the Moon for future space missions, utilizing algae as a potential food source for this experiment.
4.) Deep Space Radiation Probe (DSRP): Provided by the Department of Space Science and Engineering at National Central University in Taiwan, this payload was to help probe radiation levels during the entirety of the mission, from the coasting phase transiting from the Earth to the Moon until the spacecraft landed on the lunar surface. The payload was designed to provide data that would increase knowledge about the potential radiation exposure astronauts may encounter on missions like these, thereby making future human missions safer.
5.) Commemorative alloy plate: Developed by Bandai Namco Research Institute, Inc. and modeled after the “Charter of the Universal Century” from the animation Mobile Suit Gundam UC.
The next step for ispace
Despite this crash, the team remains RESILIENT toward its future missions, as they will gather more data and use it in their planned lunar landing missions. They currently plan to launch another lunar lander in 2027, namely Mission 3. Instead of the landers used in the current HAKUTO-R missions, though, they will use an even bigger and more capable lunar lander called Apex 1.0.
The lander will be manufactured in the United States at their branch office in Denver, Colorado. It is planned to deliver 10 times more than the capacity of the RESILIENCE lander, allowing this lander to be capable in the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, as ispace is part of “Team Draper” led by the US space and defense contractor Draper, one of the contenders for this CLPS program by NASA.
This is KYNNMASTER 123 for TWS: The Weekly Spaceman, see you in the next one! 😁
Sources:
Status Update on ispace Mission 2 SMBC x HAKUTO-R Venture Moon | ispace
Private Japanese spacecraft crashes into moon in 'hard landing,' ispace says | Space
HAKUTO-R Mission 2 lost during landing attempt - NASASpaceFlight.com
Note: This article will be updated as more information becomes available. Sources will be updated as needed, as this is a recent spaceflight event.
