This is good stuff, the more people / countries in the race, the sooner we with have people living on it.

ispace is fuckin awesome. I've had great conversations with some of the people there - they are not fucking around. On their development timeline, this landing is important, but they've been working on tech for the future missions for the last couple years already. Batteries are a big item for their long-term plan, which isn't just landing. Once it can land reliably and its rover batteries can survive lunar night, this becomes a science platform that gives lunar access to any paying customer. The Moon economy is about to break wide open, and ispace will be the ones to cut the ribbon, I'm sure of it.

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I, for one, welcome our new Japanese Moon Overlords.

I am curious about the micro rover with the second mission. That sounds neat.

Idk if anyone else got a, “Sailor Moon” visual but I enjoyed it..

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It’s still wild how there’s only one “superpower”. Japan should be considered one because it has massive cultural influence, a pretty strong military, insane technological standings, it’s allied with basically all of nato, and more. Still waiting on Zambia to catch up in space.

Is this mission landing? Or are they making sure they can get into a lunar orbit?

It’s funny to see how the “non-supers” have better programs than the “super powers” imo.. by better I mean their overall outlook and niche in space advancements is better..

dang, my research in college was designing a system for lunar rover batteries to allow them to survive the lunar night and now my job is designing a lunar lander, ima look into these guys.

Did all that and had no idea of the current leader in the 'space.' Nice college indeed.

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well we were developing a chamber design for the battery that had never been done before and were funded by nasa to do so, so their existence wouldnt have been relevant to our work whether I knew of them or not

Japan is the 3rd largest economy in the world.

It’s this companies first launch. Not sure why you were expected to know about them.

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It's landing, probably in about a month. It's also delivering a moon rover for the UAE.

Awesome! I didn’t realize we were so close to landing something on the moon again. Thanks

There are actually a lot of moon landings scheduled for this year:

• Astrobotic Technology Mission One
• Nova-C IM-1
• ISRO Chandrayaan-3
• Roscosmos Luna 25
• Nova-C IM-2
• JAXA SLIM