Japanese startup iSpace, which was trying to become the first private company to successfully land on the moon, lost contact with its lunar lander at the scheduled time, the company’s chief executive said on Wednesday, AFP reported.

monthPhoto: Yevhen Kryvoruchko / Alamy / Alamy / Profimedia

“We lost contact, so we have to consider that we were not able to complete the landing on the surface of the moon,” said Takeshi Hakamada, chief executive officer and founder of ispace. “Our engineers will continue to analyze the situation,” he added, promising to provide more information as soon as possible.

The lunar probe Hakuto-R, which has been in orbit about 100 kilometers above the moon for a month, began its descent to the surface of the moon about an hour earlier. A complex maneuver that was carried out completely automatically.

It would seem that everything went according to plan, but after the planned landing on Tuesday around 16:40 GMT, there was a wait of several tens of minutes, during which the company’s teams tried to restore communication with the lunar module.

Finally, the executive went live to deliver the bad news and assured that ispace would continue its “efforts for future missions.”

The launch of the Japanese probe was carried out by a SpaceX rocket from the US base in Florida after two delays caused by additional checks. The lunar probe, created by Tokyo startup ispace, was launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

Ispace, which has only about 200 employees, plans to create “a low-cost, frequent shuttle service to the moon.”

Hakuto’s project was one of five finalists in the international Google Lunar XPrize competition, which ended without a winner because no company could send a robot to the moon by the set date (2018). However, some projects were not abandoned.

The success of this mission was far from guaranteed. In April 2019, the Israeli organization SpaceIL saw the crash of its probe on the surface of the moon.

So far, only the USA, Russia and China have managed to deliver robots to the Moon, which is approximately 400,000 km from Earth.

India also tried to land a probe named Vikram in 2019, but it crashed.