Private Japanese company ispace It was announced today that the mission to land on the moon failed, having lost contact with the spacecraft, which may have crashed on lunar soil.

He said: “There is a high probability that the probe” Lunar Lander “finally made a hard landing on the surface of the moon. Ispace, in a statement.

“We have no plans to resume landing,” CEO and founder of the startup, Takeshi Hakamada, admitted more than six hours after Ispace lost contact with the Hakuto-R spacecraft.

The Japanese spacecraft stopped communicating with the control center that directed it from Tokyo, and the flight controls that accompanied the flight were left without any communication.

The mission was supposed to reach its destination at 15:41 on Sunday, in Lisbon, according to the countdown, which appears in the live broadcast made by the Japanese company of the start of the landing operation.

The spacecraft began its descent from an altitude of 100 kilometers above the moon and was scheduled to land at Atlas, an 87-kilometer crater in the northern hemisphere of the moon, communication was already lost during the landing process.

If the spacecraft does land, the company will be responsible for the first private project to successfully carry out a lunar landing.

So far only three government projects, from Russia, the United States and China, have managed to land on the moon.

In 2019, an Israeli non-profit organization attempted to do so, but the spacecraft was destroyed on impact.

Founded in 2010, Ispace defines itself as a “global company” whose vision is to “expand the planet” and “expand the future”, based on concrete actions such as providing transportation services between the Earth and the Moon.

The company has offices in Japan, Luxembourg and the United States, and is developing joint ventures with the North American Space Agency (NASA) and the European Space Agency.