If it lands on the Moon, Hakuto-R will be the first private mission to accomplish such a feat.
The Falcon 9 rocket’s payload also included NASA’s Lunar Flashlight, a probe that’s designed to search for water ice in permanently shadowed craters on the Moon from a near-rectilinear halo orbit . The smallsat was released from its dispenser about 53 minutes after launch to begin a four month journey to the Moon,“It was a beautiful launch,” John Baker, the Lunar Flashlight project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the NASA statement.
SpaceX had originally planned to launch its Falcon 9 rocket on November 30 but initially delayed it a day to “allow for additional pre-flight checkouts.” Later on, the companytweeted that the launch was back on. “Teams completed additional vehicle inspections and reviews; rocket and payload are looking good for launch of the ispace_inc HAKUTO-R mission 1,” the company wrote.
It’s still not clear why the rocket needed additional inspections, but at least it managed to deploy its payload successfully.
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