Japanese company starts a historic mission to the Moon

• Japan’s ispace has sent a spacecraft to the Moon.
• It is the first private mission of its kind by a private company.
• Hakuto-R, which means “white rabbit” in Japanese, is the space mission. The launch took place at 2:38 a.m. GMT on Sunday.

On Sunday, a Japanese startup sent a spacecraft to the Moon. It was Japan first-ever mission to the Moon and the first of its kind by a private company.

SpaceX, which is owned by Elon Musk, did the launch at Cape Canaveral in the US state of Florida. The launch had been put off twice for more pre-flight checks.

Live footage of the launch showed that the spacecraft, which was made by the Tokyo startup space and carried a rover made in the UAE, took off at 2:38 a.m. GMT on a Falcon 9 rocket.

Takeshi Hakamada, the CEO of the new company, said in a statement, “Our first mission will lay the groundwork for unlocking the Moon’s potential and turning it into a strong and vibrant economic system.”

Only the US, Russia, and China have been able to land a robot on the moon so far.

The first part of a programme called Hakuto-R, which means “white rabbit” in Japanese, is the space mission.

The company said that its lunar lander should land on the side of the Moon that can be seen in April 2023, which is the Year of the Rabbit in the Japanese calendar.

The United Arab Emirates built a 10-kilogram rover that is part of the spacecraft’s payload. The spacecraft is a little more than two by two and a half metres in size.

The country in the Gulf is new to the space race, but last year it sent a probe into Mars’ orbit. If the rover, named Rashid, lands safely, it will be the first mission to the Moon from the Arab world.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, the vice president of the UAE, tweeted on Sunday that the launch was “part of the UAE’s ambitious space programme.”

“Our goal is to share what we know, improve what we can do, and leave a scientific mark on the world,” he said.

The UAE’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center said that ground control was able to get a signal from the spacecraft.

Hakuto was one of five finalists in Google’s Lunar XPrize competition to land a rover on the Moon by 2018. The deadline passed without a winner, though.

The space lunar lander is also carrying two robots made by Japan’s space agency and a CD with the song “SORATO” by the Japanese rock band Sakanaction, which was written for the Google competition.

In April 2019, the Israeli group SpaceIL, which was also a finalist in the competition, failed to become the first privately-funded mission to land on the Moon when its lander crashed into the surface while trying to land.

Space, which has only 200 employees, has said that it wants to “extend the sphere of human life into space and create a sustainable world by providing high-frequency, low-cost transportation services to the Moon.”

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