Year's third try at moon touchdown nears as commercial lander enters orbit

Richard Tribou, Orlando Sentinel on May 7, 2025

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The year’s first moon landing was a big success. The second not so much. Now a third commercial lunar lander has entered orbit around the moon ahead of its chance for glory next month.

Japanese company ispace’s Hakuto-R lander Resilience looks to touch lunar dirt following the landings of American companies Firefly Aerospace with its Blue Ghost lander and Intuitive Machines with its lander named Athena.

The Tokyo-based private company announced Resilience had successfully entered lunar orbit late Tuesday. A landing attempt is planned for no earlier than June 5.

“I am very proud of the crew for successfully completing the most critical maneuver and entering lunar orbit,” said ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada in a press release. “We will continue to proceed with careful operations and thorough preparations to ensure the success of the lunar landing.”

Blue Ghost and Athena flew as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, with Blue Ghost delivering the best success to date with its March landing. The Athena lander suffered a more difficult landing just days later and that mission was declared over soon after touchdown.

A similar fate befell Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander in 2023 when it became the first commercial company to successfully make a soft landing on the moon, although tipping over limited its utility.

The venture from ispace, which has no affiliation with NASA, is its second try at a soft landing after a 2023 attempt with a similar lander crashed on the surface.

Only about half of all lunar soft-landing attempts including six crewed missions of Apollo have been successful.

Resilience launched in January from Kennedy Space Center as a secondary payload aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 that launched the Blue Ghost lander. It took a much longer, fuel-conserving trip before entering lunar orbit. Using gravity assists instead of fuel, its path saw it travel more than 680,000 miles from Earth before venturing back on its trajectory to the moon, which is only about 250,000 miles from Earth.

The plan is to attempt landing in Mare Frigoris in the far north of the moon as seen from the northern hemisphere.

On board are a small rover named Tenacious designed by ispace Europe based in Luxembourg and five other commercial science and commemorative payloads.

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