On March 11, 2011, Kazuya Yoshida’s lab at Tohoku University in Japan started shaking. Things fell from the ceiling. The bookshelves collapsed. Off the coast of the city of Sendai, the ocean floor had ruptured, triggering a magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami waves that inundated inland regions. Although it only lasted minutes, time seemed to dilate. When it was finally over, nearly 16,000 people were dead. For many of those left, there was no water, no power, no phone connection. The space that citizens had known had turned suddenly dangerous, alien.
Inside Yoshida’s lab, a team had just finished putting together the first prototype of a would-be lunar rover, nearly ready for field testing. The rover—a contender for the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize—was a metallic beetle-y thing, just 22 pounds. But somehow, it had survived unscathed.
So had John Walker, a Canadian intern and former railway engineer who worked in Yoshida’s lab. He was worried about the rover. And he knew that although the university was closed—indefinitely—he had to get the robot out. Channeling his inner burglar, he and a colleague surveyed the building, found an open window, and crawled inside. They came back out with their creation.
Today, that robot has evolved into flight-ready form, and the team has formed a company called ispace. It garnered more money in its initial funding round—$90 million—than almost any space startup in history (SpaceX, for comparison, got $61 million). That kind of investment speaks to people’s hope for its success: The company aims to send its bots to the moon, and ultimately help establish a permanent lunar settlement, in which Earth and the Moon act as a single civilized system.
For Earth-based Japan, ispace is a harbinger of space things to come. The country and its citizens are embracing space startups—starting, in some ways, with the little rover once called Sorato.
ispace’s rover is, today, an 8.3-pound machine that looks like a bug mated with a tiny tank, with a carbon-fiber body, wheels that resemble water mills, and four cameras that together give a 360-degree view of its surroundings. Another camera watches for hazards and steers the rover away from them. In the future, ispace hopes clients will put their instruments inside these armored meanderers and future landers (in exchange for currency, of course). The company imagines these robots’ progeny—and the materials they extract, and what people do with those materials—will cultivate what it calls “Moon Valley”: a place (on the Moon) where people in spacesuits live, work, and play. It’s a very 21st-century version of the mixed-use development, connected economically and socially to Earth.