WASHINGTON – Japanese corporate ispace updated the design of its lunar advertising lander and delayed its first flight for a year.
The company submitted the revised design of its Hakuto-R airstrip on July 30, while reviewing a review of the spacecraft’s design. The lander is expected to complete its first project in 2022, with a SpaceX Falcon 9.
Since an initial design review in 2018, ispace has reduced the length of Hakuto-R. Previously 3.5 meters high and 4.4 meters wide with its contact legs deployed, the lander is now 2.3 meters high and 2.6 meters wide. The weight of the spacecraft increased from 1,400 kilograms to 1,050 kilograms, basically by reducing the amount of thruster on board.
A smaller lander has less development, Ryo Ujiie, director of the contact systems engineering organization at ispace, said in a call with reporters on July 30. It also reduces the length and complexity of contact legs.
The spacecraft will use a different trajectory to go to the moon, employing a low-energy transfer orbit that requires less propellant but takes roughly twice as long as previously planned. “We had to pick a more propellant-efficient orbit” given the reduction in propellant, said Chit Hong Yam, manager of the mission design and operations group. “We’re confident that, with enough checking, we should be able to execute this orbit.”
Although the global lander is smaller, it maintains a load capacity of 30 kilograms. Once on the surface, at one of the many sites of the moon’s middle moon studied across ispace, it will run for 12 days.
The company also announced that it had selected ArianeGroup to supply propulsion for the lander. This includes a main thruster and six small “assist” thrusters, as well as 8 small thrusters for your reaction system.
Carlos Rabsiun, director of the quality, assembly, integration and testing group, said ispace chose ArianeGroup because the functionality of its most productive thrusters matched the design of its lander, as well as a favorable load and schedule. “We compared them to various foreign proposals, and it was the most productive.”
The company lifted a $95 million Serie A circular at the end of 2017 and in the past planned to launch its first contact project in 2021, a schedule the company showed last fall. However, in its announcement of the revised landing craft design, the company stated that the project was now scheduled for 2022 “in reaction to the technical upheavals that have occurred in recent months.”
During the call with reporters, ispace declined to give details of these technical issues, unless he said he had given them more time to reassure consumers and other stakeholders about the development of the lander. “To increase the likelihood of the good fortune of our mission,” Ujiie said, “we will spend more time solving this problem.”
According to this revised schedule, the lander will begin meeting in Japan next year, with a final meeting, integration and at an ArianeGroup plant in Germany. It will then be sent to the United States for its Falcon Nine launch in 2022. A contact project is still planned for 2023.