Watch live as Japanese ispace aims to be first company to land cargo on the moon

Japanese lunar exploration company ispace is attempting to land its first cargo mission on the moon on Tuesday, which would make it the first private entity to complete the feat.

The Tokyo-based company’s Mission 1 lunar lander aims to touch down in the Atlas Crater, which is in the northeastern sector of the moon. The company’s uncrewed mission carries scientific research and other payloads. There are no people on board.

Founded more than a decade ago, ispace originated as a team competing for the Google Lunar Xprize under the name Hakuto – after a mythological Japanese white rabbit. After the Xprize competition was canceled, ispace pivoted and expanded its goals, with ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada aiming to create “an economically viable ecosystem” around the moon, he said in a recent interview.

The company has grown steadily as it worked toward this first mission, with over 200 employees around the world – including about 50 at its U.S. subsidiary in Denver. Additionally, ispace has steadily raised funds from a wide variety of investors, bringing in $237 million to date through a mixture of equity and debt. The investors of ispace include the Development Bank of Japan, Suzuki Motor, Japan Airlines and Airbus Ventures.

The ispace Mission 1 lander stands about 7 feet tall and carries small rovers and payloads for a number of government agencies and companies – including from the U.S., Canada, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.

Before the launch, ispace outlined 10 milestones for the mission. The company has completed nine so far, with the 10th representing a successful soft-landing on the surface. The milestones demonstrate the complexity and difficulty of ispace’s mission, as it aims to complete a feat previously accomplished only by global superpowers. A previous private lunar mission, flown by Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL and also born out of the Google Lunar Xprize, crashed into the surface during an attempted landing in April 2019.

The company plans for this to be the first of multiple missions to the moon. Last year ispace won a $73 million NASA contract as part of a team led by Massachusetts-based Draper to fly cargo to the moon’s surface in 2025 under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.