Japanese spacecraft crashes during moon-landing
Elizabeth Cramsie: If at first you don't succeed, try and try again. It's a useful motto, but for the second time now, Japanese company, iSpace, has failed to land on the moon.
Takeshi Hakamada: In conclusion, we have not achieved the landing. So in that regards, you can say we failed.
Elizabeth Cramsie: That's Takeshi Hakamada, the CEO and founder of iSpace. Two years ago, iSpace's first attempt ended in failure when its spacecraft crashed into the surface of the moon. This second uncrewed lander was aptly named Resilience. But in a media conference today, Mr Hakamada once again had to apologise to everyone who contributed to the mission.
Takeshi Hakamada: This is the second time that we were not able to land. So we really have to take it very seriously.
Elizabeth Cramsie: The suspense had been building as the lander approached the moon and prepared to land. Up until that point, the mission had gone well, but communications were lost less than two minutes before the scheduled landing. Ryo Ujiie is the Chief Technology Officer.
Ryo Ujiie: Based on the fact that the speed of the lander was not reduced enough, I think it's appropriate to think it is crashed.
Elizabeth Cramsie: Associate Professor Alice Gorman is from Flinders University in Adelaide.
Alice Gorman: I'm very sorry that they weren't successful. It would have been an amazing mission. But what we have to keep in mind, I think, is that in some ways failure is more common than success on the moon.
Elizabeth Cramsie: She says while moon landings have been achieved before, they haven't gotten any less difficult.
Alice Gorman: People remember the successes like the Apollo missions. They don't remember the failures. And with the Apollo missions, I think we were extremely fortunate. So the President of the United States had speeches prepared if the astronauts all died. That was the real possibility. And they didn't, and that's extremely fortunate. But then there was a period after Apollo of about 50 years where people just weren't sending missions to the moon. So a lot of that continuity of knowledge was lost.
Elizabeth Cramsie: She says there's multiple challenges in a moon landing and it's more difficult than other planets.
Alice Gorman: There's no atmosphere. But what that means is that a spacecraft can't use parachutes to slow its speed down when it's coming out of orbit. It has to rely on engines. In the case of the iSpace lander, the information it was getting about its distance from the surface wasn't happening fast enough. So it's kind of out of sync with the little rocket thrusters. So it just went, poof, down it went. There's no air to slow it down.
Elizabeth Cramsie: Professor Gorman says every crash is a learning opportunity.
Alice Gorman: You learn something about your systems, your engineering. You learn something about the lunar surface, the lunar atmosphere. So it's not entirely useless. It's just not what people were hoping for.
Samantha Donovan: That's Associate Professor Alice Gorman from Flinders University, Elizabeth Cramsie, reporting.
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