Takeoff with Elon Musk – private moon mission has begun China operates two “overseas police stations” in Germany

A rocket with the commercial Japanese lunar lander “Hakuto-R” has taken off towards the moon. If all goes well, it would be the world’s first private lunar mission to succeed.

The most important things in five points:

What does the moon mission have to do with Elon Musk?

The Falcon 9 rocket, which launched the Japanese company iSpace’s “Hakuto-R” lander on its way to the moon, comes from Elon Musk’s American space company SpaceX. The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Cosmodrome in Florida on Sunday.

Hakuto means “white rabbit” in Japanese. And this white rabbit lives on the moon in Japanese mythology. The “R” stands for “reboot”, i.e. “restart” in English.

When will the lander land on the moon?

Because of the frugal route, which uses Earth’s gravity and the sun for propulsion, it will likely take until the end of April for the lander to land on the moon.

Two American competitors plan to take a more direct route to the moon early next year. Should they succeed too, they could even be there before “Hakuto-R”.

Have there been any private moon missions before?

Yes. The Israeli non-profit organization Space IL launched the Beresheet probe towards the moon. However, the mission failed shortly before finish in 2019 because a key spacecraft engine failed during the landing maneuver and communication with the spacecraft was lost. Finally, she crash landed on the moon.

So far, only government programs have managed to land on the moon. Lunar exploration began in the 1950s during the Cold War as heated competition between the United States and the former Soviet Union. The Soviets landed an unmanned probe on the lunar surface in 1959. Ten years later, the US succeeded in launching the first manned mission, Apollo 11.

Private companies have also wanted to land on the moon for years. To this end, the American technology giant Google advertised the “Google Lunar X” award for the first non-governmental team to land on the moon in 2007. The “Hakuto” ​​team also participated. But no one reached the goal by the end of the 2018 deadline.

The Japanese then undertook a “reboot”, another attempt, with “Hakuto-R”. If their mission M1 succeeds, it would be the first time in the world that a private company has landed on the moon using iSpace. However, the competition is already in the starting blocks: the American companies Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are planning a more direct route to the moon with their landers and can therefore prevent “Hakuto-R”. The founder and boss of iSpace, Takeshi Hakamada, is taking it easy: “We don’t really care who lands first,” he told the science magazine “New Scientist.” “Our vision is to create an economically viable lunar ecosystem.”

So now the Japanese are trying after their “Hakuto-R” mission had to be postponed several times.

And ISpace already has plans for the future: in 2024 there will be another lunar lander with its own rover and in 2025 a large lander. One of the company’s goals is to transport goods to the surface of the moon.

What is planned for “Hakuto-R”?

The lunar lander, which is 2.3 meters high and 2.6 meters wide with extended landing legs, weighed about 1000 kilograms on take-off. However, since most of this is fuel burned en route, the lander will weigh only 340 kilograms when it lands on the moon. It can carry 30 kilograms of cargo.

After its arrival, “Hakuto-R” is expected to spend about two weeks in orbit around the moon, getting closer to the surface with each orbit. If all goes well, the Hakuto-R, which was tested in Ottobrunn near Munich, Germany, will eventually land gently in an area called the Atlas crater. It carries international cargo on board, including a small rover from the United Arab Emirates and an even smaller two-wheeled robot from the Japanese state space agency Jaxa.

When will there be another manned mission to the moon?

With the US Artemis mission, people should now fly to the moon again after a long hiatus. The still-uncrewed Orion space capsule, which flew around the moon as part of the Artemis 1 mission, is expected to return to Earth on Sunday. After a first manned flight (“Artemis 2”) around the moon, another manned flight including moon landing (“Artemis 3”) will follow.

Incidentally, Hakamada has a mission for 2040 that people should live on the moon in a small town called “Moon Valley” with a population of 1000, including infrastructure and industry, as a video on the company’s website shows. According to the vision of the Japanese, the city on the moon will attract about 10,000 visitors annually.

(yam/sda/dpa)