In a field dominated by American and European aerospace giants, a Japanese startup has quietly been doing something remarkable: building, launching, and flying commercial lunar landers. ispace Inc. has attempted to land on the Moon twice. Both missions fell short in the final seconds. The company has now reset the program around a new ULTRA lander, a propulsion vendor change, and a revised mission sequence that pushes its first U.S. CLPS flight to 2030 pending NASA approval. The underlying thesis behind ispace's work still grows stronger with every flight, but the schedule risk is now impossible to ignore. Founded in Tokyo in 2010 by aerospace engineer Takeshi Hakamada, ispace set out to do something previously reserved for national space agencies: put hardware on the surface of the Moon. Not as a trophy. As a business. The company's long-term vision is a cislunar economy built on frequent, affordable transportation between Earth and the Moon, eventually fueled by water ice mined from the lunar poles. ispace at a Glance 2010 Founded in Tokyo ~200 Employees $90M+ Private funding raised 2 Lunar missions attempted TYO: 9348 Tokyo Stock Exchange 3 Global offices (JP, US, LU) ispace's HAKUTO-R lander series represents Japan's commercial push to the lunar surface. Origins: From White Label Space to Lunar Pioneer The company's origins trace back to the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million competition launched in 2007 to spur private-sector lunar exploration. Hakamada assembled a team in 2010 under the banner White Label Space Japan LLC, originally part of a broader White Label Space consortium spanning Europe and Japan. When the team evolved and refocused, the Japanese entity was renamed ispace in 2013, and the competition entry became known as Team Hakuto. Team Hakuto was distinctive from the start. While several Google Lunar X Prize teams pursued their own launch vehicles or full-stack lander designs, Hakuto took a leaner approach: build a rover and negotiate a payload ride on another team's lander. That cost-sharing mindset would later become central to ispace's business model. The team's rover designs, including a tethered twin-rover concept for exploring lunar lava tubes, attracted serious attention from the global space community. The Google Lunar X Prize expired in March 2018 without a winner, but ispace used those years of competition to build engineering credibility, attract talent, and lay the groundwork for the HAKUTO-R program. By 2018, the company had raised over $90 million in private funding, one of the largest fundraising rounds in Japanese commercial space history at the time. That same year, ispace signed an agreement with Draper Laboratory to serve as design agent for a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract bid. ispace's HAKUTO-R lander carried international payloads including the UAE's Rashid rover and JAXA's Sora-Q transformer robot. Mission 1: Going the Distance, Then Coming Up Short On December 11, 2022, ispace launched its first HAKUTO-R lander aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral. The mission profile was deliberately conservative: rather than a direct transfer to the Moon, the lander took a low-energy trajectory extending the flight to nearly five months. This approach reduced propellant requirements and stress on the spacecraft, maximizing chances of survival en route. The flight itself was a success by most measures. The lander operated through lunar orbit insertion, completed a series of orbital lowering maneuvers, and reached powered descent on April 25, 2023, targeting a landing site in Atlas Crater on the northeastern rim of the near side. Then, in the final minutes of descent, something went wrong. Post-mission analysis identified a software issue in the navigation system. The lander's altitude estimation algorithm misread a steep crater wall during descent, causing the onboard computer to believe the spacecraft had already landed when it still had roughly a kilometer to go. The engines cut off prematurely. The spacecraft fell the remaining distance and impacted the surface at high velocity. Mission 1 Highlights 5 months Total flight duration 1.2M km Distance traveled 2 International payloads Atlas Crater Target landing site Despite the landing failure, the mission was rich with firsts. The lander carried the UAE's Rashid rover, built by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, which would have been the Arab world's first lunar surface mission. It also carried JAXA's Sora-Q, a transformable ball robot developed with Tomy Company, designed to roll across the lunar surface in compact sphere form. Both payloads were lost in the crash, but the mission demonstrated that ispace could plan, build, and fly a commercial lunar lander to the Moon, a milestone only a handful of programs have ever reached. Hakamada's response to the failure was measured and methodical. Rather than retreating, ispace immediately began analyzing the root cause, incorporating lessons into Mission 2, and continuing to move forward. That posture, treating failure as engineering data rather than defeat, has become a defining characteristic of the company's culture. Mission 2: RESILIENCE and TENACIOUS Take On Mare Frigoris On January 15, 2025, ispace launched its second HAKUTO-R mission with two spacecraft: the RESILIENCE lander and the TENACIOUS micro rover. The names were deliberate, reflecting both the technical demands of lunar landing and the company's own posture toward setbacks. RESILIENCE was an upgraded version of the Mission 1 design, incorporating improved software, enhanced navigation algorithms, and lessons derived from the 2023 anomaly investigation. The target landing zone was Mare Frigoris, a broad, relatively smooth mare region in the northern nearside of the Moon. The approach again used a long-duration low-energy trajectory to minimize fuel consumption and stress on the hardware. Mission 2 carried a richer payload manifest than its predecessor, including a memory disk prepared in partnership with UNESCO containing cultural artifacts and linguistic data from 275 languages, a gesture that made the mission a record of human civilization as much as a technical exercise. On June 5, 2025, RESILIENCE attempted its powered descent. The spacecraft reached the final approach corridor and began its terminal phase, but contact was lost near the surface. Post-mission data indicated a hard landing: the spacecraft contacted the surface at a velocity too high for survival. The cause was under investigation at time of publication, but early indications pointed to a propulsion or guidance issue in the final seconds of descent. The cislunar corridor between Earth and the Moon is the core focus of ispace's long-term transportation vision. Mission 2 Highlights Jan 15, 2025 Launch date 275 Languages on UNESCO disk Mare Frigoris Target landing zone June 5, 2025 Landing attempt ispace absorbed the result without abandoning its direction. Hakamada's public statements following Mission 2 reinforced that the company views each mission as an iterative step in a longer engineering program, not a binary pass/fail test. The TENACIOUS rover, which would have been among the smallest lunar rovers ever to operate on the surface, remains a design concept that will evolve into future mission hardware. The Business Model: Lunar Transportation as a Service ispace's commercial model is straightforward in concept, though demanding in execution. The company offers payload delivery services to the lunar surface, selling capacity on its HAKUTO-R landers to government agencies, research institutions, and commercial customers who want hardware delivered to the Moon without building their own spacecraft. Think of it as a freight forwarder for cislunar space. This approach taps into a growing pool of potential customers. NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to companies willing to deliver science and technology