Europe likely just suffered a setback in its attempt to reach another milestone in the commercial race to use lunar resources. Tenacious, which was set to become the first European-made rover to land on the Moon, was aboard a lander that lost contact during its landing attempt — a strong sign that something went wrong.
If confirmed, this would be the second failed mission of the HAKUTO-R commercial lunar exploration program, two years after a previous crash that had already shattered hopes.
This loss will be particularly felt in Japan; ispace, the company behind HAKUTO-R and the currently missing Resilience lander that carried Tenacious, is a publicly listed Japanese company. But it is also a blow to Europe: The European Space Agency (ESA) supported the mission; and the rover was designed, assembled, tested, and manufactured by ispace-EUROPE out of Luxembourg.
Luxembourg isn’t just ispace-EUROPE’s base — it’s the reason the entity was created in 2017. As part of its SpaceResources.lu initiative, the tiny country became the second in the world after the U.S. to adopt a law giving companies the right to own resources extracted from space.
Had Tenacious’ Luxembourg-based operators managed to drive it around on the Moon, the rover would have captured video and gathered data. One of its missions would have been to collect lunar soil, called regolith, as part of a contract with NASA, to which it was supposed to transfer ownership of the samples.
“I think this will be very helpful to nail down what it means to commercialize space resources and how to do this on a larger scale, both in terms of volume and of global participation and coordination,” ispace-EUROPE CEO Julien Lamamy told TechCrunch on the eve of the landing attempt.
Winning such a contract from NASA was also a first for a European company. But it took some coaxing to get Lammy to brag about the agile team of 50 people from 30 nationalities that made this unique little rover.
Despite a resume that includes time at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and MIT, Lamamy is not one to boast. In our conversation, he admitted he had to “channel his inner American” to explain his team’s achievements. But that’s also because ispace is willfully collaborative.
For instance, the lightweight scoop that was meant to collect regolith for NASA was made by Epiroc, a mining equipment provider out of Sweden. “We co …