SpaceX Launches Hakuto-R M1 & NASA's Lunar Flashlight Missions

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket had two main payloads out of seven during launch at 0738 UTC Sunday, December 11 from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida: Japanese company ispace’s lunar lander HAKUTO-R and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s tiny moon probe called the Lunar Flashlight which is heading to a lunar transfer orbit.

Just over over 8 minutes after liftoff, Falcon 9 rocket's first stage came back for a landing at Cape Canaveral, while the upper stage deployed Hakuto-R as planned about 47 minutes after liftoff, and then ejected the Lunar Flashlight six minutes later.

Hakuto-R, which is carrying a United Arab Emirates (UAE) rover, will make a soft lunar landing -- the first ever for a Japanese-built spacecraft. The lander is expected to touch down inside Atlas Crater, which is located on the southeastern edge of the moon's Mare Frigoris ("Sea of Cold"), in April 2023.

"This is a very important moment," ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada told Space.com late last month, referring to the launch and the rest of ispace's Mission 1. "It is opening a door for the commercial cislunar industry."

NASA's briefcase-sized Lunar Flashlight will make its own way to the moon's orbit, a roughly three-month trip that will end with insertion into a near-rectilinear halo orbit — the same path that will be occupied by Gateway, the small space station that NASA plans to build as part of its Artemis moon program.

The cubesat will hunt for water ice in shadowed craters near the moon's south pole, the planned site of an Artemis base.

"We are bringing a literal flashlight to the moon — shining lasers into these dark craters to look for definitive signs of water ice covering the upper layer of lunar regolith," Barbara Cohen, Lunar Flashlight principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a prelaunch statement. "I'm excited to see our mission contribute to our scientific understanding of where water ice is on the moon and how it got to be there."

This Falcon 9 first stage booster's launch and landing, was its fifth. It previously launched SES-22 and three Starlink missions.

WATCH SpaceX launch Hakuto-R  M1 mission to the moon