Japan’s next lunar lander has entered orbit around the Moon

iSpace will soon be making its next lunar landing attempt after its Hakuto-R lander took the long way to arrive at the Moon. The lander completed a major milestone this week by entering the Moon’s orbit after a long, multi-month trip.

Launched alongside Firefly’s successful first lunar lander, Firefly, iSpace’s second Hakuto-R lander named “Resilience” entered orbit Tuesday. Unlike Firefly‘s lander, Resilience took a longer, more fuel-efficient trajectory to the Moon, making many orbits of Earth with small course corrections until it reached the Moon’s orbit.

The lander completed a nine-minute burn Tuesday afternoon, its longest burn yet, entering it into an undisclosed orbit around the Moon. Its goal will be to softly touch down on the lunar surface by early June.

iSpace’s first lander made its landing attempt back in 2023; however, it ran into a software problem, leading to a hard, uncontrolled landing.

iSpace is hoping the changes made in the last year will be enough to successfully touch down on the Moon, marking Japan’s second successful landing if completed. If the landing is successful, iSpace has a chance to gain a nice $5,000 check from NASA if it can successfully collect a sample of lunar regolith. While the agency won’t ever see this sample, it was part of a program to see if commercial operators were even capable of collecting samples at all.

The sample would be collected by Tenacious, a micro rover designed and built by iSpace’s European subsidiary, iSpace Europe. The lander also features a model house from Swedish artist Mikael Genberg called “Moonhouse,” which seems fitting.

While iSpace was beat out by its own space agency, JAXA, to being the first Japanese lunar landing, it could still be the first commercial Japanese lunar landing. Although iSpace has no real competition in Japan.

On the contrary, there are several US lunar landing companies like Firefly, Astrobotics, and even iSpace U.S., which are working on the company’s next lander for a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract for potential launch in 2026.