Japanese company wants to send landers to the moon with SpaceX rockets in 2020 and 2021
The Japanese space company ispace has announced that it will send unmanned lunar landers to the moon in 2020 and 2021. The launches are performed by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, with the landers forming the secondary payload.
Takeshi Hakamada, the president of ispace, said his company, like SpaceX, has a vision to make it possible for humans to live in space. During a conference call, he expressed his hopes of landing 30kg on the moon’s surface initially, but that he would then make it possible to land larger payloads on the moon, Ars Technica writes.
The company also wants to start mining the ice on the moon around 2030 so that hydrogen and oxygen can be used to develop rocket fuel. Hakamada hopes that by then several hundred people will be working on the moon or in orbit to run an industrial base. By 2040 it must have grown into ‘moon valley’, a small city on the lunar surface with a lot of activity and thousands of visitors per year.
Hakamada says the launch will already be successful in 2020 when the lander reaches orbit around the moon. The launch, which takes place a year later, aims to land a lander safely on the surface of the moon. This lander contains two rovers, a large and a small one. The little rover can be dropped off by the ‘mother rover’ and remains connected to it by a wire. The wire provides power and communication to the smaller rover.
The ispace company comes from the team called Hakuto, which entered the Google Lunar X Prize competition. However, no team was able to launch a lander before the deadline. After this competition was therefore cancelled, Hakamada decided to continue working and found the company ispace. According to him, $95 million has now been raised, enough to fund the two missions in 2020 and 2021.
The plans seem quite optimistic, partly because the ice on the moon is not exactly easy to reach. In addition, ispace still has to produce some of the hardware required for the landings. And the chance that many people will be working on the moon by 2030 is also not very likely, as there are few plans worldwide to bring astronauts to the moon on a large scale.