A JAPANESE spacecraft attempting a touchdown on the moon has crashed into the surface, the space company said.
The unmanned Resilience Moon Lander, from private Japanese astro company ispace, has been declared a failure for a second time.
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Friday’s flop follows the failure of the company’s first attempt at a moon landing in 2023.
Resilience had difficulty measuring the distance between itself and the moon, its makers said, so it careered into the surface going too fast.
Mission control lost contact with it and said they blamed a “hard landing” for knocking out comms.
Following the disappointment, CFO Jumpei Nozaki said: “We’re not facing any immediate financial deterioration or distress because of the event.”
Ispace will now have to wait years before taking another shot at a lunar landing.
However, the country remains committed to the mission – and a number of private companies there are looking at moon exploration as a business opportunity.
Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace in making successful commercial moon landings.
It comes amid a global race that includes state-run lunar missions from China and India.
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