Early innings (11/30/22)

Good morning. It’s a banner week for Asian space missions, and we’re only halfway through. Read on for the deets. 

In today's newsletter:🚀 HAKUTO-R🎙️ Pathfinder #0025💸 The term sheet

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ispace Prepares for a Moonshot

There’s about to be a new Moon mission in play. SpaceX is set to launch the HAKUTO-R mission from Cape Canaveral, beginning a small Japanese company’s long journey to softly place a lander on the lunar surface. 

The Falcon 9 launch for ispace scrubbed early this morning to take extra precautions before liftoff, and has another attempt planned for tomorrow morning at around 3:30am Eastern. When it launches, it will send the lander on a three-month-long trajectory to the Moon. Two other missions will also stow away on the flight: an Emirati rover and a NASA lunar orbiter.

The main event: ispace is tracking to make Japan the fourth nation ever to successfully soft-land a spacecraft on the lunar surface (following the Americans, Soviets, and Chinese). Moreover, if the startup succeeds, the HAKUTO-R lander would become the first craft completely funded and built by a private company to land on another celestial body.

ispace began working on its lander to compete for Google’s Lunar X Prize, which offered a prize to the first non-government entity to land a craft on the Moon. The competition ended in 2018—sadly, without a winner—but ispace kept at its design.

• SpaceIL, an Israeli organization and X Prize competitor, came up just short in 2019 when its Beresheet craft crash-landed on the lunar surface. 

Back to ispace: Rather than following a trajectory straight to the Moon, HAKUTO-R is taking the long way ’round. Its journey will take three months, tracing a long, spiraling route designed to conserve fuel. 

• Mission 1 will serve as a tech demo, with ispace declaring mission success only upon a lunar soft landing. 

• Mission 2 is currently slated for a 2024 launch.

Tagging along: Two additional, smaller missions will join the ispace lander for its launch. 

The UAE has a small rover of its own tucked into the Mission 1 lander. Designed by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, the rover, named Rashid, would also be the country’s first craft on the Moon. The small rover will traverse the lunar surface, studying the regolith as well as plasma conditions.

NASA, meanwhile, is flying a lunar orbiter called the Lunar Flashlight aboard the mission. If all goes to plan, the Lunar Flashlight will enter a highly elliptical orbit around the Moon and then use a laser to study ice on its surface.

Zooming out: Due to ispace taking the scenic long route to the Moon, there’s a chance it won’t be the first private lunar landing. Two other companies, Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic, are also vying for the title and aim to launch their own landers early next year. Both would take a more direct route that could put either on the surface first. 

Ispace has said it isn’t concerned with being first—instead, it’s hoping to contribute to international collaboration in a future lunar ecosystem. “We’re a quite international business already, and I’d like to position ispace as an international bridge between the US and other companies,” ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada told New Scientist. The company has offices in Japan, the US, and Luxembourg, as well as contracts with NASA and ESA for future missions.

Pathfinder #0025, featuring Clint Crosier 

Amazon Web Services just declared an on-orbit “first” for its 2.5-year-old Aerospace & Satellites division. The cloud computing powerhouse, best known as AWS, announced Tuesday that it had run machine learning software on board an orbiting satellite. 

Working with D-Orbit and Unibap, AWS machine learning processed EO imagery aboard the spacecraft, sifting the signal from the noise. In theory, this orbital “edge” computing can save precious resources, rather than just downlinking everything to the ground. 

What’s the significance? Let’s ask the chief of AWS Aerospace & Satellite (A&S) himself. For Pathfinder #0025, we sat down with Maj. Gen. Clint Crosier (Ret.), who leads A&S. After Crosier spent 33 years serving in the US Air & Space Force, he was recruited to helm AWS’s newest business unit. 

In Pathfinder #0025, Clint and Ryan unpack the announcement and also discuss what his team’s building, who they’re working with, how cloud and space fit together, and a whole lot more. 

A few teasers

• Early innings…“We’re just at the beginning of the space industry at large fully understanding how to leverage the cloud.”

• Inflection points…“When I was a young captain flying communications satellites, we would have 20 people on a particular shift flying eight satellites. Today, companies like Capella have two or three people operating 15 satellites.”

• The AWS model…“Don't go out and spend millions of dollars building out your own computer infrastructure…Use ours, pay by the minute, hand it back when you're done.” (Except, for our purposes, swap “space” for “computer.”)

Check out the full episode now: 

📺 Watch on YouTube 🍎 Listen on Apple Podcasts 🎧 Tune in through Spotify 

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In Other News

• Shenzhou-15 launched yesterday morning and docked with Tiangong at 4:42pm Eastern, kicking off a new era of two permanently crewed space stations.

• The new crew includes 56-year-old astronaut Deng Qingming, who waited more than two decades and served as a backup crew member four times before finally getting his chance to go to space.

• SpaceX’s Booster 7 completed a long-duration static fire test of 11 Raptor 2 engines at Starbase.

• Speedcast deployed new-and-improved connectivity services across multiple research sites for the Australian Antarctic Division. Starlink also recently announced service on Pitcairn Island and Easter Island, two of the most far-flung corners of the world.

Payload Insights

ICYMI, our story on ESA’s new astronaut class included this graphic:

The View from Space

The Artemis I mission passed its halfway point earlier this week. Here’s an Orion selfie of the spacecraft, the Moon, and the Pale Blue Dot…all in one shot. Not too shabby!