NASA Shows Photos Of Crashed ispace Lander

The US space agency has provided imagery of the crash site of ispace’s latest private lunar lander mission that had attempted a touchdown on the Moon’s surface earlier this month.

NASA announced last Friday that “on June 11, NASA’s LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) captured photos of the site where the ispace Mission 2 SMBC x HAKUTO-R Venture Moon (RESILIENCE) lunar lander experienced a hard landing on June 5, 2025, UTC.”

Earlier this month ispace had made a second attempt for its private lunar lander (RESILIENCE) to touchdown on the Moon’s surface. But following the landing, the ispace mission control was unable to establish communications with the lunar lander.

Crash site

Now two weeks after the attempt, NASA has released images of the crash site captured from its own spacecraft (LRO).

NASA said that “LRO’s right Narrow Angle Camera (one in a suite of cameras known as LROC) captured the images featured here from about 50 miles above the surface of Mare Frigoris, a volcanic region interspersed with large-scale faults known as wrinkle ridges.”

“The dark smudge visible above the arrow in the photo formed as the vehicle impacted the surface, kicking up regolith – the rock and dust that make up Moon ‘soil,’” said NASA.

“The faint bright halo encircling the site resulted from low-angle regolith particles scouring the delicate surface.”

The failed landing comes after ispace in April 2023 had famously attempted to ‘soft-land’ its M1 lunar lander on the Moon – defined as one which avoids damage to the lander – by slowing it down from nearly 6,000km/hour (3,700 mph).

Unfortunately, that first ever attempt in 2023 by a private company to land on the Moon did not succeed, after ispace admitted that its Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) lander had likely crashed after it lost contact with it.

And now the second attempt has also ended in failure.

Officials from ispace reportedly plan to hold a news conference to explain what doomed the latest mission.

Difficult missions

Only five countries have pulled off successful robotic lunar landings: Russia, the United States, China, India and Japan.

Of those, only the US has landed people on the Moon: namely 12 NASA astronauts in the Apollo missions from 1969 through 1972.

But the first successful private lunar landing took place on 22 February 2024, when Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus spacecraft successfully landed near the Malapert A crater, about 300 kilometres from the lunar south pole.

That marked the the first time ever that a commercial organisation had successfully landed its hardware on the moon.

Then in March 2025, US-based private aerospace firm Firefly Aerospace and it’s Blue Ghost lunar lander successfully arrived on the Moon.