Japan Joins Exculsive Moon Club

It is being reported that Japan have joined an exclusive club and become the fifth country in history to reach the moon when one of its spacecrafts successfully made a soft landing on the lunar surface early Saturday after the USSR, USA, China and India.
The key word is 'successful' landings because in the list of nations who have reached the surface of the moon it is 3rd after its Hagoromo craft crash landed on the lunar surface in 1990 although that was only because it went haywire during a flyby and they decided to dump it onto the moon instead and claim the bronze medal.
That only 10 nations have managed to land on our nearest celestial neighbour, and only 5 successfully not ending in a cloud of moon dust and a new crater, shows just how difficult it is although this weekends Japanese effort may just turn out to be another bit of Earth litter cluttering up the lunar surface as the craft’s solar panel has failed to work so will only last as long as its battery hold out, measured in hours.
If nothing else the Japanese are calling it a success as it not only landed successfully but exactly where they aimed it rather than within the six mile target area usually used by space probes and would result in a long walk for any Astro, Cosmo, Taiko, Spatio or Vyomanauts to any future lunar base.
The project was the fruit of two decades of work on precision technology by the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, at cost of 18 billion yen (£94 million) but the NASA Artemis project has two exciting missions penciled in for September 2025 to send a crewed mission to flyby the moon and September 2026 to actually land humans on the moon so things are going to get exciting and we are taking a long, overdue step to the much discussed lunar base.