By Joey Roulette

ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) – Two moon landers, one from Japan’s iSpace and one from U.S. space firm Firefly, strapped atop a SpaceX rocket in Florida on Tuesday ahead of a rare double moonshot that launch, which highlights the global rush to read the lunar surface. .

Japanese space exploration company ispace will launch its Hakuto-R Mission 2, which will make the second attempt to land on the moon after the first mission in April 2023 failed in its final moments due to an altitude miscalculation.

Meanwhile Texas-based Firefly Aerospace will launch the first moon lander, Blue Ghost, making it the third company to launch a moon lander under NASA’s public-private Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

Last year’s Intuitive Machines moon landing, although controversial and unsuccessful, marked the first private company and the first CLPS mission to hit the moon. The first lander attempt by CLPS member Astrobotic failed shortly after launch.

Countries and private companies around the world have focused on the moon in recent years for its potential to host astronaut bases and hold resources that can be mined for in-space applications. , making the Earth’s natural satellite a stage for national prestige and geopolitical competition similar to Cold. Space race in wartime.

Ispace’s Hakuto lander, named Resilience, carries $16 million worth of customer missions and six payloads in total, including an in-house “Micro Rover” that will deploy from the lander and collect sample of the month, said ispace Executive Business Director Jumpei Nozaki in an interview.

Hakuto’s landing on the moon is expected four to five months after launch, or this summer. It would require an energy-efficient path that relies heavily on Earth and the moon’s gravity in a meandering series of flybys to steer its trajectory.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost will aim to reach the moon 45 days after launch, around March 2. The lander is carrying 10 payloads from various NASA-funded customers and one from Blue Origin-owned Honeybee Robotics.

The two landers’ missions will last a full lunar day, or roughly two weeks. They cannot survive the cold lunar nights where the temperature can drop to almost minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 128 Celsius).

NASA with its Artemis program aims to return people to the moon in 2027 – but probably later – for the first time since 1972, while China plans to put its own crew on the lunar surface in 2030 after the next- next robotic missions.

CLPS missions like Firefly’s Blue Ghost, privately owned but funded by NASA, are intended to study the lunar surface and stimulate private lunar demand before NASA sends humans there with SpaceX’s Starship and later Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander.

But the US space agency is facing potential changes to the Artemis program with the incoming administration of Donald Trump, who as president-elect has largely sided with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s vision to focus closely on Mars.

“We’re invested in going to the moon and I think everybody wants us to go back to the moon,” Nicky Fox, head of NASA’s science mission directorate that oversees CLPS, told Reuters on Tuesday when asked about the potential program changes during the month. .

“The great thing about science at NASA — we do amazing science everywhere we go,” he said.