Shares of Tokyo-based Ispace Inc. tumbled by the daily limit of 20% after the company said its lander bound for the moon probably crashed on the lunar surface.
(Bloomberg) — Shares of Tokyo-based Ispace Inc. tumbled by the daily limit of 20% after the company said its lander bound for the moon probably crashed on the lunar surface.
The stock finished the day at ¥1,590 ($11.90), capping its worst performance since going public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange earlier this month. Shares had remained untraded for most of the session due to a glut of sell orders from investors.
Before the failed landing attempt, the company’s shares had increased nearly eight times from the ¥254 offering price.
“It was probably overbought going into this,” said Kirk Boodry, an analyst at Astris Advisory in Tokyo. “Now that the excitement has sort of passed, investors are going to take a harder look at what it means as a business model.”
Ispace had expected its Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander to touch down on the moon around 1:40am Japan time but lost contact with it shortly after engineers confirmed the lander was in position for its final approach. Several hours later, the company said there was a high probability that the spacecraft made a “hard landing” on the moon.
A successful landing would have made Ispace the first to place a commercial lander on the moon’s surface.
The company’s executives said the setback would not impact Ispace’s plans to send more missions to the moon.
“While the lander wasn’t able to reach the final step, we’re the first private company to collect data from an attempted lunar landing,” Chief Executive Officer Takeshi Hakamada said. That data “will greatly help us in our preparations for Missions 2 and 3.”
The apparent crash is a reminder of the difficulty of conducting missions in space, according to Steven Freeland, co-chair of a UN working group focused on issues related to the use of space resources.
“The failed landing is not the first, and will most likely not be last to have such an unwanted conclusion,” he wrote in an email. “It obviously is a setback but no doubt others will try to achieve a successful landing in the future.”
–With assistance from Loren Grush.
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