![]() ![]() Yoneda and his team showed me three toys that helped to inspire SORA-Q prototypes. “The initial idea, as we understood it from JAXA, was for a bug-like design that could move around on its own.” “The idea of making a design with the smallest number of motors, in reducing the number of components to the bare minimum-as a toy company, this is something we have been doing for a long time,” Yoneda said. In 2015, JAXA launched a space-exploration innovation hub to strengthen connections with the private sector, and a Takara Tomy executive saw a JAXA booth at an expo in Tokyo. In a Takara Tomy meeting room, Yōsuke Yoneda, an engineer who joined Tomy more than forty years ago, told me about the origins of the partnership. The company neighbors Aoto Peace Park, an urban oasis of playgrounds and a memorial that contains debris from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Takara Tomy’s headquarters is situated in Tokyo’s Katsushika ward, a low-slung downtown neighborhood on the easternmost edge of the city, a few train stops from the touristy Asakusa. (One long-standing challenge of landing missions is that they generally can’t take selfies from a distance, so scientists can’t visually diagnose problems-and images of the landing can’t go viral.) In the case of M1, mission controllers will remotely instruct their SORA-Q to turn toward the main lunar lander and transmit images back to Earth. With its honeycombed aluminum-alloy shell, SORA-Q looks something like a metallic Wiffle ball and takes its name from sora, which means “sky” in Japanese the “Q” is a homonym for the Japanese word meaning “sphere.” As the dust settles, SORA-Q will unfold like a Transformer: the sphere will split in half, exposing a pair of cameras and dividing its two hemispheres into wheels. If all goes according to plan, shortly before their main landers reach the lunar surface, they will eject various smaller probes, including SORA-Q. The M1 and SLIM missions will each follow a circuitous, months-long trajectory to the moon that consumes less fuel than a direct flight. Another SORA-Q will be carried aboard SLIM, a JAXA lander slated to touch down in 2023. On December 11th, Takara Tomy’s round rover hitched a ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which catapulted the world’s first commercial lunar lander, ispace’s Hakuto-R M1, toward the moon. SORA-Q, however, is likely to get there first. (The latter two each lost landers to malfunctions, in 2019.) Japan, for its part, will lend an astronaut to NASA’s upcoming Artemis moon missions. Other entrants include the U.A.E., India, and a private Israeli effort. NASA plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface after half a century China wants to open a nuclear-powered base. In recent years, numerous countries and companies have joined a new race to the moon, motivated not only by science and national prestige but also the potential to harvest lunar resources. In the near future, these toys are likely to be joined by a very different sort of gadget: a small, spherical moon rover named SORA-Q, which Takara Tomy designed for the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA. An R2-D2-esque Omnibot, the remote-controlled robot that I begged my parents to buy in 1985, looks ready to roll. A squad of Micronauts action figures seems to have warped in from the seventies. In a lovingly curated room in the company’s Tokyo headquarters, a miniature B-29 bomber, faintly flecked with rust, sits at the ready in a glass display case. The private museum of Takara Tomy, the Japanese toy company responsible for Transformers, Beyblade, and Zoids, is filled with playthings from Christmases past. ![]()
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