Skip to main content

Japanese firm ispace lists on the Tokyo Stock Exchange ahead of first lunar landing

ispace, a company with a spacecraft en route to the moon, is now trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

The Japanese firm raised around $52 million (¥6.7 billion) in an initial public offering last month. Shares reportedly went untraded on the first listing day due to a large volume of buy orders and demand to hold shares, Reuters reported. But today, shares have soared, with stock selling at ¥1,135, or more than four times the ¥254 offering price.

The news comes just days after ispace announced that its Hakuto-R lander would reach the lunar surface on April 25, a little over four months after the lander launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9. The highly anticipated touch-down will mark the first time a commercial company lands a spacecraft on the moon. ispace has back-up landing dates on April 26, May 1, and May 3, and has selected three alternative landing sites should conditions change.

If successful, the firm will join the United States, China and Russia as the only entities to have landed spacecraft on the moon.

ispace has been working on lunar technology for over a decade, officially forming into a company after operating as Team Hakuto in the Google Lunar X Prize competition. ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada told TechCrunch during a panel at TC Sessions: Space last year that it’s been a long road to launch.

“Twelve years is a long time to survive,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of ups and downs.”

Through that decade plus, ispace managed to raise more than $235 million in private capital from investors including Airbus Ventures, Japan’s Incubate Fund, and former chief strategy officer of SoftBank Group Katsunori Sago. The company’s also landed partnerships with Japan’s national space agency, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and will deliver a rover for the agency on this first Hakuto-R mission.

ispace is already planning its second mission to the moon for next year. A third mission in 2025, which is in development with engineering giant Draper, is part of a $73 million NASA contract to deliver scientific payloads to the lunar surface. For that third mission, ispace is serving as a subcontractor and design agent.

Japanese firm ispace lists on the Tokyo Stock Exchange ahead of first lunar landing by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch



from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/rTReNhO
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Max Q: Psyche(d)

In this issue: SpaceX launches NASA asteroid mission, news from Relativity Space and more. © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/h6Kjrde via IFTTT
Post a Comment
Read more

Max Q: Anomalous

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! Last week wasn’t the most successful for spaceflight missions. We’ll get into that a bit more below. In this issue: First up, a botched launch from Virgin Orbit… …followed by one from ABL Space Systems News from Rocket Lab, World View and more Virgin Orbit’s botched launch highlights shaky financial future After Virgin Orbit’s launch failure last Monday, during which the mission experienced an  “anomaly” that prevented the rocket from reaching orbit, I went back over the company’s financials — and things aren’t looking good. For Virgin Orbit, this year has likely been completely turned on its head. The company was aiming for three launches this year, but everything will remain grounded until the cause of the anomaly has been identified and resolved. It’s unclear how long that will take, but likely at least three months. Add this delay to Virgin’s dwindling cash reserves and you have a foundation that’s suddenly much shakier than before. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What’s Stripe’s deal?

Welcome to  The Interchange ! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up  here  so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s my job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. —  Mary Ann Stripe eyes exit, reportedly tried raising at a lower valuation The big news in fintech this week revolved around payments giant Stripe . On January 26, my Equity Podcast co-host and overall amazingly talented reporter Natasha Mascarenhas and I teamed up to write about how Stripe had set a 12-month deadline for itself to go public, either through a direct listing or by pursuin...
Post a Comment
Read more