A Japanese Company Is Attempting the First Successful Private Moon Landing. Here's How to Watch.

The Japanese company ispace hopes to pull off the first commercial lunar landing in history on Tuesday with its Hakuto-R spacecraft, which launched from Earth on December 11, 2022. 

Hakuto-R, which is carrying two tiny rovers, will livestream its attempt to achieve this milestone starting at 11am Eastern Daylight Time on Tuesday, April 25 at the link below. The landing is currently on track to take place about 12:40pm, though it may be rescheduled to another window over the coming week.

In addition to the main lander, the mission is tasked with deploying a 22-pound wheeled rover called Rashid, which was built by the United Arab Emirates and represents the first attempt to explore the Moon by any Arab nation. Hakuto-R also aims to deliver a small spherical explorer called SORA-Q, developed in part by a Japanese toy company, to the lunar surface.

If the mission is successful, it will mark the first time that a private entity has landed an intact spacecraft on the Moon and will make Japan the fourth nation in history to stick a lunar touchdown after the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. The livestream will include interviews and footage from mission control in Tokyo, and possibly images from the lunar surface if the landing goes as planned.   

“What we have accomplished so far is already a great achievement, and we are already applying lessons learned from this flight to our future missions,” said Takeshi Hakamada, Founder and CEO of ispace, in a statement earlier this month.  

“I would like to once again express my heartfelt thanks to those who have worked so hard on this mission, including the engineers who are carrying out the long-term operations since our launch back in December,” Hakamada continued. “The stage is set. I am looking forward to witnessing this historic day, marking the beginning of a new era of commercial lunar missions.”

Israel became the first nation to ever attempt a commercial lunar landing with its Beresheet spacecraft, but that mission ended in failure when the lander crashed into the Moon in 2019. Built by the nonprofit organization SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, a government-owned corporation, Beresheet spilled tardigrades, a type of extremophile organism, onto the Moon’s surface as a result of the impact.

It is very difficult to achieve a “soft landing”—as opposed to a hard crash landing—on any extraterrestrial surface. Many lunar surface missions have failed over the decades, including recent examples such as India’s Vikram, a lander that also crashed into the Moon in 2019, and Japan’s OMOTENASHI, a lander that suffered a communications breakdown after its November 2022 launch. An exception is China’s ongoing Chang’e series of Moon landers, which have all successfully touched down on the lunar surface so far.

Some space companies believe there is a future market for lunar exploration that could include resource prospecting and space tourism. To that end, a new rush of commercial missions will be attempting to soft-land on the Moon in the coming years. For instance, Astrobotic Technology and Intuitive Machines, which are both American companies, are currently on track to land spacecraft on the Moon in 2023 as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. 

In addition, the government space programs of India, Russia, and Japan all have plans to launch robotic missions to the Moon’s surface this summer. Meanwhile, NASA and its international partners continue to develop the Artemis program, which aims to land humans on the lunar surface in 2025.