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.
Richard M: Tweaking the funding amounts of course is sensible. And yes, maybe NASA should have provided the companies more funding for its lunar lander program.
I still maintain that it must never provide full funding. When it does, we have decades of evidence that this ends up producing gold-plated missions that cost too much. Better the companies struggle to find the additional funding they need. They will, because there is a demand for this. They just need an incentive to push to find it.
Consider the commercial space stations being developed right now. All are aggressively hunting for additional customers outside NASA, because they recognize that they will need that extra cash to make a go of it, even if they win a big NASA contract. And they are finding them.
Richard M,
I side with Robert Z. on this one. The more private enterprise can do in space on its own dime, the better. Government funds, even during start-up phases, should be kept to a minimum because government money always comes with strings attached.
There’s a line from one of my favorite movies, John Milius’s The Wind and the Lion, spoken by Sean Connery’s Raisuli character to Candice Bergen’s kidnapped widow character, as he explains why he is in revolt against the Sultanate of Morocco:
“The old sultan was allowing the Europeans to give him money. And money is always followed by more Europeans.”
Fortunately, we now seem on the verge of retiring this government-money-is-essential paradigm for good. Elon is doing a good deal more than “musing” about industrializing the Moon to get a jump on his AI competitors. That’s what the whole SpaceX IPO thing is about. If the IPO happens – as seems increasingly certain – then the Moon will shortly be almost exclusively the domain of private enterprise.
That will be mainly SpaceX with perhaps a supporting role played by Blue Origin – BO does have some extant tech for making solar cells from lunar regolith after all. SpaceX might find it useful to license this or simply assist Blue in getting into production in return for guaranteed dibs on much or all of the output for a time in order to get the in-space AI data centers project going ASAP.
SpaceX, for its part, will need to stand up lunar power, mining, smelting, metal sheet rolling and propellantless yeeting of G-insensitive mass commodities to lunar orbit industries from bootstrap to scale and in roughly that order. Once these industries are established and growing nicely, there will be production to spare, allowing other lunar business use cases to get started downstream of these basic industries. Those will certainly include tourism.
NASA, other national space agencies and even, perhaps, the PRC, in the few years remaining to it, will manage to sponsor some purely scientific and exploratory work as a minor adjunct to the SpaceX-dominated industrialization that will be the main lunar story, but these will be edge cases. What will make them a bit bigger than they otherwise might have been will be the ability of said government science outfits to make use of a bit of the material abundance being cranked out by lunar industry – refined and rolled metal to construct Farside radio telescopes, for example. Rented or leased use of reusable lunar landers as suborbital hoppers to get materials and personnel to and from exploration sites will also stretch the government’s buck.
If in-space AI data centers become normative and use cases for same continue to proliferate, it may also prove true that this same industrialization paradigm will be applicable to Elon’s Mars ambitions – putting those on a paying basis much sooner than would otherwise have been the case. That would allow both settlement projects to proceed in parallel with great confidence that both would reach a positive cash-flow condition by reasonably predictable dates.
After that, onward and upward will be the order of the day in all directions. From inside Mercury’s orbit to the Asteroid Belt, human industry should have significant footholds or even more nearly everywhere by century’s end. And there will already be pioneering efforts beyond The Belt on some of the gas giants’ and ice giants’ moons.
To be 16 again; with this future.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be 16 again for all the tea in the PRC.
Richard M:
I am compelled to point out that Bob’s argument(s) is siding with that pesky aspect of human nature, while yours are demonstrable exceptions only.
This is not a criticism of Man’s nature, just a reminder that each of us will seek to perform in a manner that yields the greatest return for the least expense (expense in the broadest of contexts, not just financial). We will act in this manner unless we individually have chosen values that take into account the possible cost of said “expediency.”
We may recognize this potential cost ourselves, or have it thrust upon us by competition. Of course, competition can be eliminated by those who desire to eliminate it by edict or fiat.
I too side with Bob.
Hello gents,
Thank you for the replies. I grok your concerns, because I share them!
But what I really was trying to get at was a (growing) criticism of NASA management, which many in the industry feel has been handling its fixed cost and Space Act agreements/contracts poorly, because right now NASA managers have no experience on the private side of the fence, and don’t understand how these companies have to work to close business cases; and as a result, too often they’re trying to balance their own ledgers on the back of their contractors. Eric Berger had a story on this issue last year. Key passage:
It didn’t help that NASA has lost senior people like Alan Lindenmoyer, Kathy Lueders, and Phil McAllister over the last few years, because they were the ones who actually had some sense about commercial contracts.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/11/as-nasa-increasingly-relies-on-commercial-space-there-are-some-troubling-signs/
Richard M wrote; “SpaceX overcame that because they definitely found a large market for the *rocket* that more than made up for Dragon’s limited client base.”
“Found” may be the wrong word. It wasn’t so much that they found the market but that they designed their Falcon launch vehicles for commercial clients. A launch vehicle that is good for commercial payloads just happens to be appropriate for many government launches, too. Being less expensive to make than other launch vehicles and its reusability made it so much cheaper and so available that it became extremely popular, and a new customer base was created because the breakeven point is lower with Falcon than with the heritage vehicles. This has included some of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) landers.
Cargo Dragon is designed to dock and open to the inside of manned space stations, so it may not be appropriate to act as a manufacturing capsule.
On the other hand, Starship was designed to take a lot of mass and a lot of people to Mars. To do this it also must take thousands of tons of propellants to orbit (over multiple launches, not all in one), so it is easily adapted to a large “found” market of other payloads. Starship, too, is cheap to make and is designed to be reusable with a much lower turnaround time. Customers can loft much more massive payloads, so another, newer, customer base can create itself. Some of that customer base could be future lunar landers that are better than SpaceX’s lunar Starship.
_________________
Dick Eagleson wrote: “Once these industries are established and growing nicely, there will be production to spare, allowing other lunar business use cases to get started downstream of these basic industries. Those will certainly include tourism.”
If water is found at the poles, SpaceX will undoubtedly use the Moon (lunar orbit) as a re-tanking station for interplanetary travel.
Because Starship can carry so much mass, and because the design is for many launches daily, establishing industries and multiple bases on the Moon could occur surprisingly quickly. As with the development of other SpaceX vehicles and ground facilities, early versions of lunar habitats would likely be relatively temporary, replaced after a couple of years with better versions.
In a way, this is what we had expected would be made possible by the Space Shuttle, an inexpensive way to get exploration hardware and manned stations (orbital or otherwise) into space with the many expected launches each year. The Falcons are starting the job and now the Starships are on the verge of doing better than the Shuttle ever could.
Which brings us back to private, commercial, non-governmental funding being better than governmental funding.
With the government in charge, all we got was what little government wanted, including with CLPS, but now that We the People are taking charge, we are starting to get what we had expected to get from all the taxes we had paid to government all these decades. The dreams of Disney and von Braun are beginning to come true.
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Dave Walden,
I was recently reminded that man’s nature is clearly expressed by two- and three-year-olds. They are violent and greedy, insisting upon having their own way, and it is up to parents to teach them civility and patience. Not all parents succeed, which is why we have these people in the world, in government, and in Minnesota.
Edward: I fixed your tags. Note that if you start with the “strong” tag, you must end with “/strong”, not the “em” tag.
Similarly, if you start with “em”, you must close with “/em”, not “strong.”
Thank you for fixing my lack of attention to detail. “Attention to detail” will have to come off my résumé. Looks like I got mixed up during proofreading. Not sure how that happened, as I put the tags in before adding the text (often pasted in between the tags).
Sorry to cause you the extra work.
Dick E. There are reasons the Bible is seen as providing Man with wisdom after claiming he is tragically flawed because of his “nature.” There are seemingly endless examples of adults who remain “childish.”
His pre-pubescent childish “nature” requires he become “informed” so as to mature into a post-pubescent child of the universe. His journey from the mud to the stars will be achieved through his wider and overwhelming nature!
His capacity to Reason, to the extent “it” becomes informed, will provide him the means whereby he may resist yielding to what you correctly point out as his “childish” one at birth!
Hello Edward,
I accept your correction, “found” was not an ideal term. Clearly, SpaceX anticipated that this market would exist, that they could compete well in it, and designed (and refined!) Falcon 9 accordingly.
They were less confident about the market for Dragon, and that was borne out.
Dave Walden,
I think your comment is more properly directed at Edward as I made no observations about Man’s nature, either as an adult or a child.
Edward,
Agree that lunar-sourced propellant – or at least LOX, which is the preponderant mass component of both hydrolox and methalox propellant combos – could become very significant for ships heading farther out than the Moon relatively soon. I’m a skeptic anent the existence of significant lunar “water” so hydrogen and carbon (for methalox) will likely have to come from other sources than the lunar surface. NEO asteroids might well prove significant sources of both.
Also agree that there is likely to be a lot of “creative destruction” of quickly-outgrown lunar surface facilities as industrial activity there ramps sharply up.