Crash and learn (4/26/23)

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In today's edition...🌝 ispace hard-lands🌏 US, Korea boost cooperation💸 The term sheet 

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A Lunar Hard-Landing

The Moon will have to wait a little longer for its first non-governmental visitor.

ispace’s attempt to soft-land the first commercially-funded spacecraft on the lunar surface ended in failure yesterday. After a five-month journey that sent the HAKUTO-R lander on a swooping, gravity-assisted trajectory around the Moon, the Japanese company revealed that it lost communication with the craft just before touchdown.

“At this moment, we are very proud of the fact that we have already achieved many things during this Mission 1,” said ispace founder Takeshi Hakamada. 

Zooming out: The space industry is betting on a bustling cislunar economy, and the ability to get to the lunar surface sustainably will be key. So far, ispace is the second company to attempt to land a privately-funded craft on the Moon. (The first, fellow Google X Prize competitor SpaceIL from Israel, crashed its Beresheet lander into the lunar surface in 2019.)

So which companies are still in the running to make history?

• Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic are now vying for the #1 position, having each built landers of their own that are destined for the Moon this year. 

• Several companies are working on their own lander missions, including Firefly, Masten Space Systems, and Draper Labs (among many others).

• ispace itself isn’t giving up so easy—its two additional lander missions are currently slated for 2024 and 2025.

End of the line: On ispace’s livestream, the lead-up to the landing appeared to track with the company’s target metrics. But hours after the expected landing, ispace released a statement saying the lander ran out of fuel and the "descent speed rapidly increased," making it a "high probability" that it crashed into the lunar surface. 

The team maintained communication with the lander until the very end of landing, when the signal went dark. 

• “That means we acquired actual flight data during the landing phase,” Hakamada said. “That is [a] great achievement for the future missions, Mission 2 and Mission 3.”

• The team has not yet regained contact with HAKUTO-R or Rashid, a UAE-designed rover that hitched a ride to study the lunar regolith and plasma conditions.

Market reactions: ispace IPO’d on the Japanese stock market this month with a per-share price of ¥254 ($1.90), valuing the business at ¥20B ($150M). The market reacted with enthusiasm, sending shares surging 373% on the day after the public offering and closing at ¥1,201($8.99) that day.

As of this writing, ispace stock is trading at ¥1,590, down ~20% on the day.

Hakamada is confident that the company will still be able to secure financing for its future missions despite losing contact with Mission 1. “That’s why we built our sustainable business model, to continue our effort for the future missions,” he said.

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Friends in High Places

VP Kamala Harris and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol visited Goddard Space Flight Center outside DC on Tuesday to get a firsthand look at the agency’s work to monitor and combat climate change.

Hot mess: Harris, who chairs the National Space Council, and Yoon, who is in DC for a state visit, received briefings on NASA’s recently-launched TEMPO mission, which will measure air pollution over North America, as well as Seoul’s Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer, which has been monitoring air quality in the Pacific since it launched in 2020. 

Harris on Tuesday said she directed the National Space Council to ensure these programs can also monitor the southern hemisphere, including Africa and South America. 

“This can not be a global initiative if any nations around the world are excluded,” she said. 

Better together: US and South Korean officials signed a joint statement of intent to boost space cooperation between the two nations in areas such as space communications; research on the Moon’s surface; astrophysics and planetary science; and space exploration, according to a White House official. South Korea has already signed on to the Artemis Accords. 

The Biden administration has made space a centerpiece of the two state visits it’s hosted so far, showing the soft power opportunities afforded by collaboration in orbit. When French President Emmanuel Macron came to the US in November, he paid a visit to NASA HQ in DC. 

Secrets of the cosmos: Harris and Yoon also saw the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a wider-view follow on to the Hubble Space Telescope that is led by researchers at Goddard. The telescope is expected to capture light from a billion galaxies over its five-year mission after launching in the mid-2020s.

In Other News

• The Space Force approved SpaceX’s lease of the SLC-6 launch pad at Vandenberg.

• Victus Nox, a Pentagon mission, will move the military closer to its goal of on-demand launch. 

• Russia’s scheduled spacewalk on Tuesday was postponed until May to allow for more mission prep time. 

• NASA's chief Bill Nelson reaffirmed the agency’s commitment to working with Russia on the ISS through decommissioning. 

• SES’ merger with Intelsat may face antitrust regulatory headwinds. 

• Quantum Space is planning to fly its Ranger transfer vehicle sooner than the 2025 date it initially targeted. 

• Correction: Dan Geraci, who FreeFall Aerospace hired as president and COO, is still also serving as chairman of the Planetary Society’s board.

The View from Space

UAE’s Hope mission sent back the first up-close pictures of Mars’s moon, Deimos.