The Resilience spacecraft, built by the Japanese company ispace, could not make a soft landing on the Moon. Contact with it was lost two minutes before landing.
Resilience was launched on January 15, 2025. The vehicle flew to the Moon on an economical (and, consequently, longer) trajectory to save fuel. Therefore, it took 3.5 months to enter orbit around it. Over the next month, the spacecraft gradually lowered its orbit altitude while engineers prepared for its lunar landing.
Unfortunately, the June 5 operation failed. Contact with the probe was lost less than two minutes before it was scheduled to land on the Moon. According to telemetry, at that point it was traveling at too high a speed and at too low an altitude to survive contact with the lunar surface.
This was the second attempt by ispace to conquer the Moon. The first time the Japanese company tried to do it was in 2023. Then the probe “Hakuto-R” built by it also managed to reach the lunar orbit. However, it crashed on the final landing stage due to a software error.
It is currently unknown how this failure will affect ispace’s plans. In 2026, the company’s U.S. division planned to launch a new lunar mission, designated APEX 1.0. Its landing site was to be the 320-kilometer Schrödinger crater, located near the Moon’s south pole. However, after the second fiasco in a row, these plans may be revised.
