I'm John Baster, Bob Zimmerman. He keeps the website behind the black. It's happy birthday, Bob Zimmerman.

Your donations and subscriptions most welcome. Japan struggles with rocket engineering, oddly, given the

quality of the Japanese builders and automobiles and ships and anything electronic for many years. But, Bob, it's odd to me that

Jaxa or whatever company right now, we're talking about iSpace, has not been successful. Can we

explain it? I can't really explain it, John. In this particular case, this is a Japanese

Luna Land,er startup company called

iSpace. They have made two attempts to land softly on the moon, both failed, very close to landing

for some reason. Both cases, software issues made the failure. They have a series of additional lunar land emissions, one with NASA, one with Japan, one with Europe. However, it has now been revealed that they are having engine problems. They're developing their landers with an engine. It appears that engine is underpowered.

They're now improvising maybe replacing it. This is not good. You don't want to, you want to

build your engine first and then the spacecraft around it. It appears, they're now in a position

to have to do it the reverse order. And that is not a good thing. And why this happens in Japan, John, I can't explain it.

It's really puzzling.

And Jackson is a state enterprise, correct?

It's not private.

That's correct.

Jackson is the government agency.

In this case, this is a private company building landers to sell to governments and to other private

people to put payloads on the boat.

So they've been hired by NASA, they've been hired by Jaxa, and they've been hired by the

European Space Agency to do different lands down the road.

They haven't yet successfully landed, but they did run two missions

that were almost successful. So what can you say? The engine brought me here. There was much more

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