Japan's ispace's first commercial lunar lander, HAKUTO-R M1, is scheduled to be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in November.
CTOnews.com, October 16, two SpaceX customers have announced plans to launch two unrelated lunar missions next month.
CTOnews.com reported that NASA confirmed on October 12 that its space launch system (SLS) rocket would be sent to the Kennedy Space Center's LC-39A launch pad for the fourth time as early as November 4. Barring an accident, the next launch of the SLS rocket is scheduled to take place no earlier than 12:07 et on November 14.
On the same day, Japanese startup ispace confirmed that its first commercial lunar lander, HAKUTO-R M1, would be launched sometime between November 9 and 15 by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.
It is worth mentioning that NASA signed a $73 million contract with ispace to develop the second-generation SERIES-2 lunar lander in the United States, but the first-generation HAKUTO-R project was almost entirely ispace's own private project.
The first Hakuto-R M1 lunar lander will attempt to send two lunar rovers-one made in Japan, the other made in the United Arab Emirates-and several other commercial payloads to the lunar surface.
The HAKUTO-R 's launch weight is expected to be 1050 kilograms, and the design goal is a 30-kilogram available payload that can land on the moon. Ispace designed and built most of the lander's structure, and Europe's Ariana Group will provide it with propulsion systems that will be fully assembled, integrated and tested in Germany.
According to ispace documents, Falcon 9 will launch HAKUTO-R into a "supersyn" Earth orbit, where the lander will check its system and eventually use thrusters to enter lunar orbit. The phase from Earth's orbit to the lunar surface is expected to take at least 20 days, while the lunar rover is designed to stay on the moon for 12 days. In the meantime, it will attempt to operate its on-board experiments, deploy two miniature detectors and transmit all the data collected back to Earth.
Since its establishment in 2010, ispace has raised about $210 million. Coincidentally, in the same year, the US Congress forced NASA to start developing SLS rockets. In 12 years' time, the first launches of both SLS and HAKUTO-R are likely to take place in those days.
