The failure of the ispace lunar lander highlights the challenges, in particular for nascent private companies.
Getting a mission to the Moon, around 384,000 kilometres from Earth, is much more challenging than lofting a satellite into low-Earth orbit — and failures can occur early on, even for missions that don't plan to land. This happened with NASA’s Lunar Flashlight mission, a small spacecraft that launched in December and was supposed to map the Moon’s ice. Its propulsion system malfunctioned soon after launch and may keep it from reaching an orbit from which it can do the intended science.
Even if a lander makes it to the vicinity of the Moon, it still has to navigate its way down to the surface with no global-positioning satellites for guidance and virtually no atmosphere to help to slow it down. Once it gets within the crucial last few kilometres, its software has to deal quickly and autonomously with any last-minute challenges, such as its sensors potentially becoming confused by large amounts of dust kicked up from the surface by exhaust plumes.
Both of the 2019 landing failures probably stemmed from software and sensor issues during these final moments. And early indications suggest that this week’s ispace failure could have been caused by the lander running out of propellant just before it touched down., including as many as three by the end of the year that are partially funded by NASA.
One of these landers, built by the company Astrobotic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was anticipated to take off in early May, but delays in readying its rocket means the launch will probably slide by several months at least. That could mean that a lunar lander from Intuitive Machines, in Houston, Texas, is first up to launch, perhaps as early as June.
These companies will be looking at the experience of others as they try to achieve the first successful private Moon landing. “The rising tide lifts all boats,” said Alan Campbell, an engineer who works on CLPS projects at the company Draper in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at a lunar conference this week before the ispace failure. “If we can learn from what happens for commercial or NASA CLPS missions and apply that across — that’s absolutely something we should be doing.
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