On the moon where the sun's shining
it's blindingly bright.
Where it isn't, it's pitch black.
The surface is covered in the finest particles of sand.
It's a tricky environment
for even the most advanced machines to navigate.
And before fleets of these things start roaming
the real moon, this engineer has many late nights ahead.
Perfecting this rover and testing it
on an artificial landscape like this one
will get us one step closer to establishing
the first human settlement away from Earth.
Discovery, roger, go for deploy.
One day when you and I make it up to the moon,
it could be thanks to her.
My name is Akane Imamura
and I built miniature lunar rover.
Going to the moon used to be something
only the biggest governments dreamed of.
But with the growing commercialization of space
some of the most exciting projects now
are taking place at startups.
And today I'm back in my hometown to visit one of them.
iSpace got its start in 2010 as a group of engineers
competing for the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE.
The competition expired last year without a winner.
But having raised more than $90 million
from Japan's government-backed funds and companies
including Japan Airlines, iSpace is now focused
on becoming a business in its own right.
So this is the rover?
Yeah, this is the rover.
And I'll tell ya,
Indy's never seen a driver like this.
When you think of a space rover,
you might think of the moon buggy
used in three of the Apollo missions.
There's a big crater.
They're the ones.
Or the Opportunity rover
that looked for water on Mars.
Next to these two hulking creations from previous decades,
iSpace's machine is so small it looks like a toy.
Flip it over?
Yeah.
Akane's team is racing against their deadline
of 2021 when a SpaceX rocket will blast iSpace's lander
carrying two rovers into orbit around the moon.
After a soft landing, each rover will roll out
and roam the lunar landscape, sending images, video,
and mapping data back to Earth.
Tomorrow Akane's team
will take one big step forward.
They're going to be taking
these two prototypes to a fake moon.
Akane's responsible
for the structural elements of the Rover.
And that involves everything from choosing
the best physical materials to make a lightweight
but still resilient machine to the thorny challenge
of designing the shape of these wheels.
Early the next morning we made our way
to the suburbs outside Tokyo.
And once the city's high-rises
give way to smaller neighborhoods
we reached our destination,
the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, known as JAXA.
Here on Earth this is the closest thing to the moon.
We have an hour, hour and a half of real testing
this morning with both Rover A and Rover B
doing their tests in parallel.
Make sure that we're logging and backing up all the data.
Okay, let's do it.
And after a few final preparations they started the tests.
At first was a series
of 10 meter crawls along flat ground.
With every run, Akane's team reconfigured the rover
to have a different weight distribution.
The plan was to see which versions
would be able to run straight.
And measure how much
the rogue ones would veer off-path.
And then it was the hardest part of the day,
the lunar hill climbs.
And with a chance to play a very tiny role
in establishing humanity's presence
on the moon, I couldn't resist.
Dear future lunar residents
and lunar tourists, you're welcome.
Bye bye.
Bye.
For about two days a week, Akane works from home.
And it's this flexibility that's helped her
balance a job as daunting as building a space rover--
With another equally demanding responsibility.
But in a country that has one
of the developed world's worst records on gender inequality,
Akane's success is still rare,
and even for her a pretty recent development.
Akane has a Master's in Mechanical Engineering
and her first job out of school involved research
on concrete and later on metals
at a big prestigious Japanese manufacturer.
She was one of very few female engineers
in an R&D department dominated by men.
Several times Akane considered
quitting work altogether and becoming a full-time housewife
while her husband pursued his career.
In 2017, Akane joined iSpace
as a spacecraft structure engineer.
The hectic nature of life at a startup
has come with its own challenges.
But in a company that's attracted young people
from countries like France, the US, and Canada
she says she's a lot happier now.
iSpace predicts its city on the moon
will be ready in 2040.
By then, with an estimated $1 trillion
global space industry to serve we'll have a whole generation
of engineers building machines
to explore the moon, Mars, and beyond.
Now that they've successfully completed their field tests,
Akane and her coworkers have been busy
analyzing all the data they collected
so they can start designing the next iteration of the rover.
Their first true milestone
will be the rover's launch day in two years' time.