Japan’s lunar lander startup Ispace wins contract with Korean rover startup
Artist rendering of Ispace’s Ultra lunar lander
The Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace has won a new customer for its next attempt to soft-land on the Moon, with the South Korean startup Unmanned Exploration Laboratory (UEL) signing a contract to put its proposed two-wheeled rover on that mission.
Under the terms of the agreement, the UEL rover will be integrated as a commercial payload on ispace’s ULTRA lunar lander for Mission 3, currently scheduled to launch in 2028. The mission would mark the first Korean rover to explore the Moon’s surface and underscores the growing commercial collaboration between Japan and Korea in the aerospace industry.
Mission 3 will serve as the inaugural flight for ispace’s ULTRA lunar lander.
Ispace so far has a very mixed record. It has successfully gotten two landers to the Moon, but both failed just before landing. It has also recently had to delay its lander mission for NASA because it had to replace the lander’s engine, the previous engine found to be inadequate.
Ultra is Ispace’s new larger lander design, intended to fly on all future missions. It remains untested in flight. The company presently has lander contracts for the following missions:
- 2028: a Japanese mission funded by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry
- 2029: a Japanese mission funded by Japan’s Space Strategy Fund (designed at encouraging the private space sector
- 2030: NASA’s mission, being built in partnership with the American company Draper
At the moment, everything about Ispace remains tentative. It needs to finally land something on the Moon to truly establish itself.
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
Artist rendering of Ispace’s Ultra lunar lander
The Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace has won a new customer for its next attempt to soft-land on the Moon, with the South Korean startup Unmanned Exploration Laboratory (UEL) signing a contract to put its proposed two-wheeled rover on that mission.
Under the terms of the agreement, the UEL rover will be integrated as a commercial payload on ispace’s ULTRA lunar lander for Mission 3, currently scheduled to launch in 2028. The mission would mark the first Korean rover to explore the Moon’s surface and underscores the growing commercial collaboration between Japan and Korea in the aerospace industry.
Mission 3 will serve as the inaugural flight for ispace’s ULTRA lunar lander.
Ispace so far has a very mixed record. It has successfully gotten two landers to the Moon, but both failed just before landing. It has also recently had to delay its lander mission for NASA because it had to replace the lander’s engine, the previous engine found to be inadequate.
Ultra is Ispace’s new larger lander design, intended to fly on all future missions. It remains untested in flight. The company presently has lander contracts for the following missions:
- 2028: a Japanese mission funded by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry
- 2029: a Japanese mission funded by Japan’s Space Strategy Fund (designed at encouraging the private space sector
- 2030: NASA’s mission, being built in partnership with the American company Draper
At the moment, everything about Ispace remains tentative. It needs to finally land something on the Moon to truly establish itself.
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
Good to see that the colonial-and-WW2 hatchet anent Japan and Korea is being buried in lunar regolith. Both nations are latecomers to deep space surface exploration – even if not so much so as Europe and, particularly, the UK – and a team-up of this sort makes good sense.
The note about a “two-wheeled rover” in Robert Z’s write-up had me wondering if it was a gyro-stabilized lunar motorcycle-ish device. Nothing quite so exotic as it turns out. UEL has three rover designs in the works. The smallest is a transverse two-wheeler that carries a narrow chassis between two outboard wheels. The other two rovers-in-development are four-wheeled designs. All of the wheels have paddles around their peripheries so there is at least a mild whiff of 19th Century American riverine transport about them.
More things of interest, in addition to the recently much-expanded Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, to look forward to anent the Moon during the closing years of this decade are certainly welcome. Even better if they’re not Chinese.