They want moon landings to be a commercial reality — and that’s just the start

Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of Ispace / Photo credit: Ispace

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with Disrupting Japan where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with Japanese entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Boys, be ambitious.

That was a parting advice given in 1867 by William S. Clark to the students of what would become Hokkaido University. While Clark is not widely known in his home country of the US, both he and his advice are legendary here in Japan. Yet, very few Japanese boys or girls are ambitious.

Of course, many of Japan’s most ambitious people are the very ones starting startups out there. With that, I’d like to introduce you to one ambitious Japanese startup. They are literally a moonshot company, raising over US$90 million to pursue their dream.

Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of Ispace, plans on landing commercial payloads on the moon in the next two years. The company is not making rockets like SpaceX or Blue Origin but lunar landers and rovers. Hakamada’s project, Hakuto, was recognized at the Google Lunar X Prize, a US$25 million global competition.

Here’s our conversation.

Can you explain your plans with Ispace?

We are trying to provide a commercial transportation service to the moon in the next few years. From there, we want to get into the mining business in space. Our vision is to expand the planet and the future. We want to create a world where human beings can live in space.

In the next two years, you plan on doing two missions: to send a lunar orbiter and to soft land and deploy a lunar rover on the moon. Do you feel confident that you’ll be able to do these in a short time?

Yes. First of all, we are already experienced. We have developed a lunar rover already and started the lunar lander development one year ago.

However, three years is still a short time, especially in the space industry. Usually, the space program will take about five to 10 years. But there’s already available technology that provides many of the components that we need, so the only thing we have to do is design the system properly and assemble the components.

Our ultimate goal is to construct the mining plant on the moon. But in the first few years, our focus is to transport a small craft. Our transportation capability is just a 30-kilogram payload vs the 100-kilogram capacity of government-backed missions.

Tell us about your team.

We’re about 45 or 50, and there’s a small team based in Luxembourg. We knew that the Luxembourg government is also interested in the space mining business, so we contacted them. We had an agreement, then we set up an office and started hiring people there.

Soft landing on the moon is extremely expensive. Can private companies do it?

So far, the government has invested a lot of money for lunar landing. And over time, things have become more advanced, bringing down the costs.

In our case, a 30-kilogram payload would cost several million dollars per kilogram. That’s five or 10 times cheaper than government missions.

Will the economics work?

What is the biggest challenge in completing the missions?