On March 27, 2026, ispace announced two major pivots in a single press conference in Tokyo's Nihonbashi district: a unified lander design called ULTRA and an entirely new business line, the Lunar Connect Service, targeting the emerging market for cislunar communications, navigation, and space situational awareness. The announcements came three days after NASA unveiled its Ignition plan for a permanent lunar base by 2030, and ispace made clear that timing was not coincidental. For a company that has crashed two landers on the Moon, the pivot toward infrastructure services represents a calculated bet that the revenue opportunity in keeping future missions connected could be at least as large as the transportation business itself. CEO Takeshi Hakamada put the addressable market at $3 billion annually by the 2040s and said ispace intends to capture it with a constellation of at least five satellites in lunar orbit by 2030. ispace's announcement at a press conference in Nihonbashi, Tokyo on March 27. The company plans its first Lunar Connect satellite by 2027. Credit: AI-generated illustration Starting Over: The ULTRA Lander The lander redesign was forced, at least in part, by an engine problem. ispace had been co-developing a new main engine called VoidRunner with U.S. propulsion startup Agile Space Industries since 2021. The engine was intended to power both the Apex 1.0 landers built by ispace's American subsidiary and the Series 3 landers under development in Japan. By February 2026, ispace executives were publicly warning that VoidRunner was not hitting its required performance levels and that a switch was under consideration. The March 27 announcement confirmed the switch. ispace will replace VoidRunner with an engine from an undisclosed supplier that has flight heritage, including on prior lunar lander missions. The CTO, Ryo Ujiie, declined to name the supplier while the contract is finalized, but the language used ("flight experience, including on lunar lander missions") points to a small pool of candidates with that specific track record. The ULTRA Design Philosophy The name derives from the Latin word for "beyond." ispace describes ULTRA as a global unification of its Japanese Series 3 and American Apex 1.0 programs into a single platform, combining the Series 3 core architecture with key Apex 1.0 technologies including propellant tanks and a communications system built around relay satellites in lunar orbit. AI-generated image The ULTRA lander unifies ispace's Japanese Series 3 and American Apex 1.0 designs into a single platform for high-frequency, lower-cost lunar transport missions starting in 2028. The restructuring also changes how ispace organizes its engineering teams. A single global pre-manufacturing development group now reports to Ujiie, replacing the previously separate Japan and U.S. design units. Assembly, integration, and testing will continue at separate facilities in both countries, with mission control split across three sites globally. The goal is to cut per-mission costs by eliminating redundant development and procurement. The consolidation comes with some job losses. CFO Jumpei Nozaki declined to specify numbers, saying the headcount reduction would represent a "modest fraction" of ispace's more than 350 employees worldwide. The company also still needs NASA's formal approval for the restructured CLPS mission schedule, which the ULTRA announcement significantly reshuffled. A Mission Schedule Turned Inside Out Before March 27, ispace's next missions were scheduled as follows: Mission 3 (an ispace U.S. CLPS lander led by Draper for NASA, targeting 2027), Mission 4 (a Japanese lander, 2028), and Mission 6 (another Japanese lander, 2029). All of that has changed. Mission Target Date Platform Notes Mission 2.5 2027 Lunar orbit satellite (Alpine/Lupine relay) Delivered by Argo Space OTV. Launches Lunar Connect Service. Mission 3 2028 ULTRA lander (Japan) SBIR-funded by Japanese government. Formerly Mission 4. Mission 4 2029 ULTRA lander (Japan) Space Strategy Fund award. Formerly Mission 6. Mission 5 2030 ULTRA lander (ispace U.S.) NASA CLPS, led by Draper. Three-year delay from original 2027 plan. Pending NASA approval. The most notable casualty is the ispace U.S. CLPS mission, which slipped from 2027 to 2030, a three-year delay attributable directly to the VoidRunner engine failure and the subsequent design unification. Some commercial payloads originally booked on that mission are expected to move to the Japanese Mission 4 or Mission 5 landers. Nozaki said ispace is in active discussions with NASA but needs formal agency approval before the new schedule is treated as final. The silver lining in the shuffle is Mission 2.5. By inserting a satellite delivery flight in 2027 using Argo Space's orbital transfer vehicle, ispace can begin generating revenue from the Lunar Connect Service a full three years before its next U.S. lander flies. That sequencing matters to investors watching a company that has yet to post a lunar landing success. Lunar Connect: Selling the Signal, Not the Ride The Lunar Connect Service announcement is the more strategically significant part of the March 27 news. ispace is describing a four-layer commercial service to be delivered from a constellation of lunar orbiting satellites: communications, positioning, observation, and space situational awareness. 5 Satellites by 2030 $3B+ Annual market by 2040s 2027 First satellite (Mission 2.5) LunaNet Standards compliant The communications layer will provide high-speed data links across surface-to-surface, surface-to-orbit, and surface-to-Earth links. The positioning layer will deliver latitude, longitude, and timing data to precision standards for payloads operating anywhere on the lunar surface, fully compliant with the LunaNet standards framework coordinated by NASA, ESA, and JAXA. Hakamada specifically noted that ispace intends Lunar Connect to complement, not compete with, the national LunaNet constellation efforts underway at those agencies. The observation and SSA layers extend the service into monitoring functions. The observation service captures imagery of designated lunar locations on demand or via continuous coverage windows. The SSA layer tracks objects in the cislunar volume, providing data on their presence, size, orbit, and operational status to paying customers. That last piece has a growing commercial market, with Anduril's recent acquisition of ExoAnalytic and the U.S. Space Force's own cislunar tracking investments signaling how seriously defense and civil customers are taking awareness beyond geostationary orbit. AI-generated image Five satellites forming ispace's planned Lunar Connect constellation by 2030, providing communications, navigation, imaging, and space situational awareness services across cislunar space. KDDI and Argo Space: Building the Ground Floor Two partnerships underpin the Lunar Connect rollout. On the ground side, ispace has agreed with KDDI Corporation, Japan's second-largest telecom operator, to jointly develop and operate the Earth-based ground station network needed to receive high-capacity lunar signals. KDDI already has a Space Strategy Fund award from the Japanese government to study a lunar mobile communications environment, giving it relevant expertise and an existing funding base for the work. KDDI will supply technical specifications for the ground station functions and communication service characteristics, while the two companies jointly develop future plans. The eventual division of roles and responsibilities is still being negotiated. The agreement brings ispace access to KDDI's established global ground station infrastructure and telecom relationships, which the company would need years to build independently. Key Partners in Lunar Connect • KDDI Corporation: Japan's major telecom operator. Provides Earth-based ground station infrastructure and expertise in Moon-Earth communication systems. Jointly studyi