Engineers lost contact with a Japanese lunar lander on Tuesday.
The device was set to become the first commercially developed spacecraft to land on the Moon's surface.
- The lander, made by Tokyo-based ISpace, was launched on a SpaceX rocket on Dec. 11.
- The spacecraft was intended to deploy an exploratory rover developed in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a baseball-sized robotic device made by Japan's space agency JAXA.
- The lander successfully entered the Moon's orbit and was expected to land on the lunar surface on Tuesday at 12:40 p.m. ET.
- Engineers lost contact with the spacecraft after an expected pause in communications shortly before it touched down.
- "We have to assume … that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface," said Ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada.
- The U.S., Russia, and China remain the only countries to have successfully landed a robotic device on the Moon.
