The private Japanese mission of the Resilience module to the Moon fails.

TOKYO—The Japanese company ispace, which was planning for the Resilience lander to be the first privately owned lander in Japan and Asia to reach the lunar surface, declared the mission a failure after failing to establish communication with the device hours after the maneuver.

The Resilience module began the lunar landing sequence as planned in the early hours of the morning in Japan, but the control center on Earth was unable to establish communication after this phase.

YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN : Blue Ghost module captures amazing photos of the sunset on the Moon

“ At 8:00 a.m. local time (23:00 GMT Thursday) on June 6, 2025, mission controllers determined that communication with the lander is unlikely to be reestablished and therefore Success 9 (the penultimate step) cannot be completed. It has been decided to terminate the mission ,” the firm said in a statement .

Engineers at the Hakuto-R mission control center in Nihombashi, Tokyo, transmitted the commands to execute the lunar landing sequence at 3:13 a.m. local time (18:13 GMT Thursday), and Resilience began its descent phase.

“ The module descended from an altitude of approximately 100 kilometers to approximately 20 km and then successfully fired its main engine, as planned, to begin deceleration ,” the company detailed how the operation unfolded.

Although the module's attitude was confirmed to be near-vertical, telemetry was subsequently lost and no data was received to indicate a successful landing.

According to the analysis performed by the control center with the available data, the laser rangefinder used to measure the distance to the lunar surface experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values, and as a result, the lunar lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the speed required for the planned lunar landing.

YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN: NASA decides to delay the return of astronauts to the Moon again, which is now planned for 2027.

“ Based on these circumstances, it is assumed that the lander likely made a hard landing on the lunar surface ,” the iSpace team determined, which does not currently have further details on the module’s fate and condition.

“Given that there is currently no prospect of a successful lunar landing, our top priority is to quickly analyze the telemetry data obtained so far and work diligently to identify the cause ,” ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada said in the statement and at a press conference alongside other visibly affected mission members.

Hakamada apologized to his followers and described the mission's outcome as "disappointing." Some 500 people gathered at the company's headquarters in the Japanese capital in the early hours of the morning to watch the operation live.

The company said it will work to identify the cause of the failure and will conduct a new attempt in 2027 with a new module.

“ We want to catch up as soon as possible ” with the American companies that have already achieved this feat, Hakamada said.

Resilience was scheduled to land on the moon at 4:17 a.m. local time on Friday (7:17 p.m. GMT on Thursday), and the operation was being broadcast live online and in person at its headquarters in Tokyo and its global subsidiaries, in a broadcast that began full of optimism after the failure of two years ago.

About 20 minutes after the scheduled landing time, one of the people in charge of the broadcast indicated that contact with the aircraft had not yet been confirmed, but that the control staff would continue trying to communicate with it, and the live broadcast ended shortly thereafter.

The incident is similar to what happened in April 2023, when the first Hakuto-R mission (this was the second) ended in failure when communication was lost moments before landing.

The Resilience module was scheduled to land on the Mare Frigoris plain in the northern hemisphere of the Moon, carrying the Tenacious microrover, designed, manufactured, and assembled in Europe by ispace's Luxembourg subsidiary, to explore the surrounding surface.

In addition to the small rover, the lander carried other scientific payloads such as an electrolysis device to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen for the first time on the Moon , an experiment for food production, and a deep-space radiation probe.

The Japanese company ispace had previously attempted, unsuccessfully, to become the first Japanese and Asian company to land on the moon. So far, the only private companies to achieve this feat have been the American company Intuitive Machine, with its Odysseus lander in February 2024, and Firefly Aerospace, with Blue Ghost last March.

Resilience was launched in January of this year aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and entered lunar orbit in early May, where it orbited safely awaiting landing.

TOPICS