ispace opens Denver control center for lunar missions

ispace Inc., a Tokyo-based aerospace company, has a brand new mission control center in the metro Denver area.

The company’s American subsidiary ispace-U.S., based out of the Denver area, announced Wednesday that it opened its new Summit Mission Control Center — a hub to manage future lunar lander missions on the dark side of the moon.

The command center in Centennial will lead Mission 3, where ispace will send a lunar lander to the Schrödinger Basin to analyze the dark side of the moon as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program led by Draper.

The company in Japan opened its U.S. headquarters near Centennial Airport nearly a year ago. It also has another base in Luxembourg, in addition to Tokyo.

The lunar lander mission scheduled for 2026 will have seismometers on board to collect NASA’s first seismic data on the moon’s far side to better understand its history.

The Schrödinger Basin is a massive crater near the lunar south pole and the site of one of the most recent volcanic activities on the moon known to man.

The scientific research is meant to help prepare the groundwork to get humans to live and work on the moon as NASA moves forward with the Artemis space program. The lunar poles are important, because of its high concentration of water.

And the study is in line with the company's efforts to get 1,000 people to live on the moon by 2040, Ron Garan, CEO of ispace U.S., told The Denver Gazette in April during Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

“Ispace’s vision is to help build a thriving cislunar economy, and the Summit Mission Control Center is a vital part of the operational infrastructure,” said ispace-U.S. Mission Director Tyler Mundt.

The mission hub has two operation rooms. In the main one, there are operator console stations where mission data will be displaced. It has dark walls and a moon light on the ceiling. The second room is for payload operators and customers during missions or simulations.

“By leveraging lessons learned from our counterparts in Tokyo and Luxemburg from ispace Missions 1 and 2, we have been able to accelerate our ground segment development and produce a highly equipped and capable Mission Control Center available for training and preparation years before our launch date," Mundt said.