After five long months journeying through space, ispace’s Hakuto-R lander is ready to greet the lunar surface.
The Japanese company is expecting to land Hakuto-R at 12:40 PM EST today. If successful, this first mission will no doubt be a huge boon for ispace’s ambitious plans to send two subsequent landers to the moon in 2024 and 2025. It would also make them the first private company to land on the moon, and the first spacecraft from Japan to do so. (China, the United States, and the USSR have been the only nations to reach the lunar surface.)
This first mission, appropriately named Mission 1, kicked off last December when ...
