Japan’s government gives Ispace a $125 million contract to build a high-precision lunar lander
Is Japan’s failed space agency JAXA finally
starting to become irrelevant?
The Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace last week announced it has won a $125 million contract to build a high-precision lunar lander targeting a 2029 launch in the Moon’s “polar regions”.
Ispace, inc, a global lunar exploration company, announced that the company was selected to implement its proposal for “High Precision Landing Technology in the Lunar Polar Regions” project under the second phase of Japan’s Space Strategy Fund. The technology will be implemented in ispace’s Mission 6, with development now underway.
The funding amount is subject to change based on stage gate reviews and other factors, so full receipt is not guaranteed at this time.
The mission will also include a lunar orbiter that will act as a relay communication satellite that will also remain in orbit after the mission to provide communications for future missions, not only for polar missions but for missions to the Moon’s far side.
Ispace plans to use some of the technology it is developing for its 2nd generation lunar lander, scheduled to fly in ’28.
This contract is significant because it appears to leave ownership of the project entirely in Ispace’s hands, with Japan’s space agency JAXA having little design or management control. It also appears to use the funds from country’s ten-year $6.6 billion fund as intended. That fund was established in 2023 to support new space startups under the capitalism model, whereby the companies provide the product and government and JAXA are merely the customer.
Up until now it appeared this fund was accomplishing little. In fact, there have been indications that JAXA was trying to repurpose the fund for its own benefit, using it to hire a lot more staff while maintaining control and ownership of any project, rather than let the private sector own its own work.
Since JAXA has increasingly done a very bad job promoting Japan’s space exploration industry, those indications were a very bad sign for Japan’s future in space.
This deal appears however to use that strategic fund properly, even if JAXA might still be skimming a large percentage of the fund off the top. This is not unlike what NASA has been doing. Bureaucrats must be bureaucrats, and all government agencies must be eternal and immortal, no matter what.
Like NASA, however, the success of Ispace and rest of Japan’s private space sector from projects financed by this fund will eventually allow that private sector to make those bureaucrats and JAXA irrelevant. It is happening now in the U.S. It now appears there is a chance it will happen in Japan as well.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Is Japan’s failed space agency JAXA finally
starting to become irrelevant?
The Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace last week announced it has won a $125 million contract to build a high-precision lunar lander targeting a 2029 launch in the Moon’s “polar regions”.
Ispace, inc, a global lunar exploration company, announced that the company was selected to implement its proposal for “High Precision Landing Technology in the Lunar Polar Regions” project under the second phase of Japan’s Space Strategy Fund. The technology will be implemented in ispace’s Mission 6, with development now underway.
The funding amount is subject to change based on stage gate reviews and other factors, so full receipt is not guaranteed at this time.
The mission will also include a lunar orbiter that will act as a relay communication satellite that will also remain in orbit after the mission to provide communications for future missions, not only for polar missions but for missions to the Moon’s far side.
Ispace plans to use some of the technology it is developing for its 2nd generation lunar lander, scheduled to fly in ’28.
This contract is significant because it appears to leave ownership of the project entirely in Ispace’s hands, with Japan’s space agency JAXA having little design or management control. It also appears to use the funds from country’s ten-year $6.6 billion fund as intended. That fund was established in 2023 to support new space startups under the capitalism model, whereby the companies provide the product and government and JAXA are merely the customer.
Up until now it appeared this fund was accomplishing little. In fact, there have been indications that JAXA was trying to repurpose the fund for its own benefit, using it to hire a lot more staff while maintaining control and ownership of any project, rather than let the private sector own its own work.
Since JAXA has increasingly done a very bad job promoting Japan’s space exploration industry, those indications were a very bad sign for Japan’s future in space.
This deal appears however to use that strategic fund properly, even if JAXA might still be skimming a large percentage of the fund off the top. This is not unlike what NASA has been doing. Bureaucrats must be bureaucrats, and all government agencies must be eternal and immortal, no matter what.
Like NASA, however, the success of Ispace and rest of Japan’s private space sector from projects financed by this fund will eventually allow that private sector to make those bureaucrats and JAXA irrelevant. It is happening now in the U.S. It now appears there is a chance it will happen in Japan as well.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I like this move, though it has to be said that iSpace has struggled in their lunar missions so far; one wonders if $125 million is going to be enough for them to get over the hump. (I think NASA’s own CLPS program has suffered likewise from awards that just arguably weren’t big enough for startups to properly design and test whilst closing their business cases.) But it’s moving in the right direction, I guess.
Richard M: It is far better for the government to give too little than too much. These companies are going to own the products they develop. They should find independent funding outside the government to make it happen, rather than rely solely on the government dole.
Giving them all that they need will also make them lazy and sloppy. And we have empirical proof, with every company ever issued a cost-plus contract.
The negatives that come from tight financing will work themselves out eventually, and we will end up with better technology as a result.
Hello Bob,
Well, I think it depends — for starters, on what you are asking a startup to do, and also at what stage in the product or market you are talking about. When you look specifically at the CLPS program, every one of these missions we have seen to date has not been able to get private customers to cover anything more than a small fraction of the mission cost. From what I have heard, Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines, and Firefly all lost money on the missions flown to date. And their size and their margins makes that an iffy enterprise to sustain, and we have already seen two CLPS contractors (Masten, OrbitBeyond) die before they even got to launch. Tom Zurbuchen, whose brainstorm CLPS really was, has basically conceded since that this was a problem because the funding was not there to do the kind of design and testing needed to avoid the failures we have seen so far, and NASA has been tweaking award amounts going forward, it seems…
If you look at COTS as the model here, that first COTS award to SpaceX was big enough that SpaceX could (barely) close the business case on the first stage of Falcon 9 and Dragon 1 development, and even so, as we know, SpaceX had a couple of near death experiences back then. It also has to be said that neither SpaceX nor Orbital Sciences/Northrop has ever found any commercial market for their cargo vehicles, at least so far. SpaceX overcame that because they definitely found a large market for the *rocket* that more than made up for Dragon’s limited client base.
I think a fair bit about the prospects for a genuine cislunar economy and when I do, it’s hard to see how it gets going without someone bootstrapping it – that is, to provide the initial impetus that gets an actual market for products and services going. Right now, that market still does not exist in any significant way, though certain NASA officials clearly *wish* it existed, because they’re trying to do everything on the cheap. The hope of some peeps has been that a NASA sponsored lunar base might be a major part of that bootstrap. But now we have seen in the last few weeks Elon Musk musing about massive use of the Moon as a basis for large scale space-based AI data centers . . . and maybe, *that* will be the bootstrapping mechanism. But obviously, Elon is in a position to sink massive amounts of cash up front into something like that without a near-term profit return. Hardly anyone else is!
P.S. I should add that it’s possible to make the argument that OrbitBeyond and Masten could have died no matter what, for other reasons; though if that is true, one could ask (and, some have!) whether NASA really did its due diligence on ’em when giving them contracts. I do not know enough about OrbitBeyond to say anything about them, but I do think Masten deserved a better shot than they got, and a contract that was even half again what they got from NASA might have at least got them to launch, and that could have opened up some VC wallets if they got some success out of it. But that didn’t happen, and Masten died . . . and much of its wreckage and personnel were scooped up by Astrobotic . . . but it’s a little unclear what Astrobotic’s long-term prospects are, too.