The Japanese company Ispace has not become the first private company to land a ship on the surface of the Moon, the Hakuto-R. The landing of the unmanned aircraft was to take place at 6:40 p.m. (Spanish time) today, after a five-month journey and after the ship took off in December last year from the SpaceX facilities in Cape Canaveral (Florida, USA). .USA). But 25 minutes later, the ground control of the mission has not been able to confirm the moon landing and has recognized that control had been lost with the ship.
After being in orbit around the Moon since March 20, Hakuto -2.3 meters tall- began the one-hour landing phase from its position, in the orbit of the Moon, about 100 km above the surface, moving at almost 6000 km/hour. After arriving at the site and supposedly landing on the edge of the Mar Frigoris in the northern hemisphere of the Moon, mission control received a signal from the spacecraft but immediately lost it, leading it to assume that the mission had failed and the ship had been lost.
In this way, Japan has not been able to become the fourth country to land a ship on the Moon, after Russia, the United States and China. This success comes after the failures of JAXA, which last month lost its new H3 rocket to manual destruction and less than five months since the solid-fuel Epsilon rocket failed after launch in October. An Israeli non-profit organization attempted to land on the Moon in 2019, but its spacecraft was destroyed after impacting the lunar surface.
After the announcement of the failure of the mission, the top technical managers of the same have announced that they immediately began to investigate what had happened and its causes, although they did not hesitate to affirm that the mission had been a great learning experience for future missions. and that in this sense it had been a success.
