The ispace company announced that its first devices will go to the moon in 2020 and 2021, industrial exploitation of the satellite's resources will begin by 2030, and a whole town will be built on it by 2040.
Japanese company ispace has announced plans to send two missions to the moon over the next three years. SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches have already been reserved: it is reported that both probes will become a passing load for launch vehicles and will start from the second stage, from a geostationary transfer orbit, from where they will reach the target using their own propulsion engines. But these ambitious plans are just the beginning. The founder of the startup, Takeshi Hakamada, said that by 2040, a whole town will operate on the satellite, which will be visited by 10 thousand people a year.
So, already in 2020, ispace is going to first send the Hakuto-R orbiter on a flight to the moon, which will allow to work out the technology of flight to the lunar orbit, check the operation of control and navigation systems - and just take pictures of the surface. A year later, a descent probe should also be launched, including two small rovers, the "mother" and the "daughter" connected to it by a cable, which will be able to examine the entrances to the tunnels left on the Moon by the flows of the now cooled lava. The cable will provide power and communications to the miniature scout.
Already in 2021, the Japanese from ispace are going to land two lunar rovers on the moon.
However, ispace stipulates that for the success of the project as a whole, these studies are not so important: the key task of the second mission will be to develop soft landing technologies plus a demonstration of the company's capabilities to deliver cargo weighing up to 30 kilograms to the moon. Subsequently, this value should increase and the startup will offer everyone who wants to send devices to the satellite. In parallel, a project is being considered for the extraction of oxygen and hydrogen from water ice from the bottom of lunar craters.
“By 2030, we expect to start producing rocket fuel and shipping it for spacecraft,” says Khakamada. According to him, by this time, hundreds of people will be working on the Moon and its orbit, and by 2040, Lunnaya Dolina, a basic complex that includes industrial, scientific and tourist facilities, will be operating here, attracting thousands of people a year.
Note that Takeshi Hakamada himself headed the Hakuto team, which participated in the Google Lunar X-Prize competition. Dozens of enthusiasts from different countries fought for an impressive reward, which was to go to whoever was the first to deliver a working interplanetary vehicle to the moon, without involving state space agencies and without using their support.
The task turned out to be extremely difficult, the deadline for the end of the competition was postponed several times, and recently it ended altogether: none of the participants could fulfill all the conditions. However, in the course of work on the project, Khakamada founded ispace and, according to him, has already attracted about $ 95 million in investments to complete work on his "lunar project" - almost as ambitious as Elon Musk's plans for the development of Mars.
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Sergey Vasiliev