Japanese and American companies are preparing lunar landers for launch in Florida, by Reuters

Written by Joey Roulette

ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) – Two lunar landers, one from Japanese company iSpace and the other from U.S. space company Firefly, were attached to a SpaceX rocket in Florida on Tuesday ahead of an unusual double launch to the moon, highlighting… The global rush to explore the lunar surface.

Japanese space exploration company ispace will launch its Hakuto-R Mission 2, its second attempt to land on the moon after an initial mission in April 2023 failed in its final moments due to an error in estimating the altitude.

While Texas-based Firefly Aerospace will launch the first lunar lander, Blue Ghost, making it the third company to launch a lunar lander under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

Intuitive Machines’ lunar landing last year, albeit lopsided and partly unsuccessful, marked the first private company and first CLPS mission to land on the moon. A previous attempt at a lander by CLPS member Astrobotic failed shortly after launch.

Nations and private companies around the world have focused on the moon in recent years for its ability to host astronaut bases and hold resources that can be mined for applications in space, making Earth’s natural satellite a theater of national prestige and geopolitical competition similar to the cold. The Space Race in the Age of War.

ISpace’s Hakuto lander, named Resilience, carries $16 million worth of customer missions and six payloads in total, including an internal “micro rover” that will be deployed, Jumpei Nozaki, ISpace’s chief business officer, said at a press conference. From the lander and collecting samples from the moon. interview.

Hakuto is expected to land on the moon four to five months after its launch, or this summer. It will take an energy-efficient path that relies heavily on the gravity of the Earth and the Moon in a winding series of flybys to guide its path.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost rover aims to reach the Moon 45 days after launch, around March 2. This lander carries 10 payloads from a variety of NASA-funded customers and one from Blue Origin-owned Honeybee Robotics.

Both landing missions will take a full lunar day, or roughly two weeks. They will not survive the frigid lunar night where temperatures can drop to nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 128 degrees Celsius).

Through its Artemis program, NASA aims to return humans to the moon by 2027 – but likely later – for the first time since 1972, while China plans to put its own crews on the moon by 2030 after a series of robotic missions.

CLPS missions like Firefly’s Blue Ghost, privately owned but largely funded by NASA, aim to study the lunar surface and stimulate private demand for the moon before NASA sends humans there using SpaceX’s Starship and Blue’s subsequent Blue Moon lander Origin.

But the US space agency faces potential changes to its Artemis program with the incoming administration of Donald Trump, who as president-elect has largely sided with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s vision of focusing heavily on Mars.

“We’ve invested in going to the moon and I think everyone wants us to go back to the moon,” Nicky Fox, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, which oversees the CLPS program, told Reuters on Tuesday when asked about potential changes to the lunar program. .

“The great thing about NASA science is that we do amazing scientific research wherever we go,” she said.