On June 6, 2025, Japanese space startup ispace announced it had lost contact with its uncrewed lunar lander, Resilience, just minutes before a planned touchdown at Mare Frigoris. If confirmed, this would mark the second consecutive crash for ispace, following its inaugural mission in 2023. The failure underscores the formidable challenges faced by private companies in mastering lunar landing technology—and raises questions about the future of commercial lunar exploration.
A New Era of Private Lunar Missions
In recent years, national space agencies such as NASA, Roscosmos, China’s CNSA, and India’s ISRO have been joined by private companies in a race to return to the Moon. Early successes include:
- Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander (January 2024), which achieved the first U.S. commercial soft landing.
- Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost (March 2025), which successfully touched down near the lunar south pole.
- Japan’s JAXA slim lander SLIM (September 2024), which landed at a shallow angle near the mean center of the Moon’s near side.
ispace’s Resilience was poised to join these achievements by becoming the first non–U.S. entity outside government programs to achieve a soft landing. Instead, its abrupt descent failure highlights the steep learning curve private ventures must navigate.
ispace’s Ambitious Vision
Founded in 2010 by CEO Takeshi Hakamada, ispace aims to commercialize lunar resource utilization—particularly mining water ice for rocket fuel and life support—and to build a logistics infrastructure for future crewed missions. Its “Husky” lunar rover, carried aboard Resilience, was designed to:
- Traverse up to 100 meters from the landing site.
- Gather soil samples for onboard analysis.
- Transmit high‐resolution imagery of the lunar regolith, temperature profiles, and radiation levels back to Earth.
Resilience also carried five external payloads worth US $24 million from industry and academia, including two scientific instruments from Japanese firms and a micro‐rover developed by ispace’s Luxembourg subsidiary.
Launch and Descent Profile
Resilience launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral on January 8, 2025. After a six‐day cruise, the lander entered lunar orbit on January 14. The descent sequence—braking burn, attitude alignment, and radar‐guided powered descent—had been meticulously rehearsed through high‐fidelity simulations. Video feeds from onboard cameras and telemetry data streamed live to mission control in Tokyo and a viewing event at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.
At 3:15 a.m. JST on June 6, Resilience departed orbit, beginning an hour‐long spiral toward Mare Frigoris. During the final 90 seconds, radar altimeter readings should have guided the lander to within meters of the surface. Instead, at approximately 4:16 a.m., altitude readings suddenly plunged to zero, triggering a loss of communication and suggesting a hard impact rather than a controlled touchdown.
Echoes of the 2023 Mission Failure
In April 2023, ispace’s first lander—Hakuto-R 1—crashed due to a miscalibrated radar altimeter. That mission’s software had underestimated the lander’s true altitude by about 15 meters, causing the thrusters to cut off prematurely. Learnings from that incident led to software updates and additional redundancy in Resilience’s descent guidance. Yet the hardware remained largely unchanged, and the same perilous final‐approach dynamics appear to have reemerged.
Payload and Scientific Goals Lost
Among the key experiments now imperiled:
- Regolith Composition Spectrometer: Intended to measure mineralogy for potential in-situ resource utilization.
- Thermal Probes: Designed to record subsurface temperature gradients and heat flux.
- Biological Exposure Unit: To test microbial survivability under lunar conditions.
- Radiation Monitor: To quantify cosmic and solar particle flux at ground level.
- Husky Micro-Rover: Equipped with multispectral cameras and a sample drill.
The loss of these instruments deprives researchers of critical data on water‐ice distribution, thermal properties, and near‐surface radiation—key parameters for both science and future human habitation.
Global Competition and Shared Lessons
Resilience’s failure highlights the “right‐of‐passage” trials faced by every lunar lander team. NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program has similarly seen mixed results: Intuitive Machines’ second lander, Athena, ended up on its side in March 2025, unable to deploy most of its payloads. Firefly’s Blue Ghost remains a silver lining, demonstrating that small companies can succeed when they carefully manage descent control, hazard avoidance, and robust communications.
Each crash informs the next attempt. ispace has convened an independent failure review board—including JAXA advisors, flight‐software experts, and aerospace engineers—to dissect telemetry, reconstruct the final seconds via simulations, and audit the descent‐guidance algorithms.
Economic and Strategic Implications
ispace’s market capitalization surged past ¥110 billion (US $1.2 billion) in early 2025, buoyed by investor optimism following Blue Ghost’s success and expectations for Resilience. Since news of the crash, ispace shares have tumbled roughly 25 percent, erasing hundreds of millions in market value. The company now faces urgent fundraising needs to finance a third attempt, tentatively scheduled for late 2026.
Strategically, Japan seeks to position its private sector alongside national efforts in lunar exploration. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and JAXA have pledged technical and regulatory support. METI Minister Ken Saito stated, “We will collaborate with ispace to analyze the failure, implement corrective measures, and preserve Japan’s leadership in commercial lunar endeavors.”
International Reactions
— NASA: Administrator Bill Nelson praised Firefly’s Blue Ghost and offered NASA’s partnership for future commercial missions: “We welcome global partners expanding lunar access.”
— ESA: Director General Josef Aschbacher called the new wave of private landers “an exciting development,” noting that lessons from Resilience will inform Europe’s own robotic missions.
— Russian and Chinese Media: Both emphasized the difficulties faced by private entities, contrasting them with state‐backed successes like China’s Chang’e missions and Roscosmos’ Luna 25.
The Path Forward: Third Attempt in 2026
During today’s press conference, ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada confirmed a third mission is already in preliminary planning. Key steps include:
- Comprehensive Telemetry Reconstruction: Recovering onboard data from global ground‐station archives to reconstruct the final descent trajectory.
- Enhanced Sensor Fusion: Integrating LiDAR and stereoscopic vision to augment radar altimetry and provide real‐time obstacle mapping.
- Revised Descent Profile: Adjusting throttle algorithms to account for propellant slosh and thermal contraction of fuel lines.
- Ground‐Station Redundancy: Expanding uplink/downlink capacity via multiple tracking stations to reduce the risk of single‐point communication failures.
Hakamada pledged to maintain the current lander design—focusing on incremental software and avionics upgrades—while deepening collaborations with JAXA, Sumitomo Mitsui, and ESA.
Academic Perspectives
Dr. Sarah Johnson, Professor of Planetary Science at Caltech, commented, “Commercial crashes are not failures but milestones on the road to routine lunar operations. Each anomaly yields vital engineering insights.” Similarly, Dr. Haruto Nakamura of the University of Tokyo observed, “Deploying multiple small rovers with off‐the‐shelf landers democratizes lunar science. Resilience’s instruments, though lost, will inspire new designs in in‐situ resource experiments.”
Conclusion
The probable crash of Resilience represents both a setback and a learning opportunity in the nascent field of private lunar logistics. As ispace prepares for a third landing bid, the global space community watches closely: success could unlock a sustainable supply chain to the Moon, paving the way for fuel depots, robotic mining, and eventual crewed outposts. For now, Hakamada and his team must dissect this failure, secure funding, and refine their technology—ensuring that 2026’s mission rewrite the narrative from crash to conquest.
READ MORE: Japanese Private Lander “Resilience” Likely Crashes in Historic Moon Attempt
