Everyone has the Moon on their mind—but ispace, a Japanese robotics firm, is solidifying plans to go there.

The company announced today that it will contract with SpaceX for two flights, one in 2020, the other in 2021. The first mission will see the company insert an orbiter into lunar orbit, sending a lander down shortly after, while the second mission will include a rover deployed by a landing vehicle.

ispace previously funded the HAKUTO team, one of the finalists for the Lunar XPRIZE. In the end, none of the teams reached the goal to launch a Moon mission by March of this year, ending the cash prize portion of the competition. But ispace is taking all the hard work of the HAKUTO team and putting it into HAKUTO-R, in which the R stands for "reboot."

This contract with SpaceX could well be the company's maiden lunar voyage. "We share the vision with SpaceX of enabling humans to live in space, so we’re very glad they will join us in this first step of our journey," ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said in a press release.

For the most part, these two missions are technology demonstrations. After this, ispace plans on exploring the process of water extraction at the poles of the Moon, where water deposits are abundant. The eventual goal is to use several rovers contracted with other companies to expand a human presence on the Moon. The announcement comes just a week after SpaceX announced plans to send Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to space on the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR).

If the mission is successful, ispace could be the first private entity to place a craft around another celestial body other than the Earth, and then go on to make the first landing on another body's surface. Only time will tell if it goes off without a hitch.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io