PRESS

Contact:
Email:
Website:Shuhei Akimoto
pr@ispace-inc.com
www.ispace-inc.com

March 2, 2017

Lunar Exploration Company ispace and Luxembourg Government
Sign MoU to Co-operate Within the SpaceResources.lu Initiative
ispace becomes the first space resource exploration company in Luxembourg to berecognized for its focus on the Moon.
Luxembourg, March 2, 2017 — ispace, inc, a Tokyo-based private lunar robotic
exploration company and the Government of Luxembourg announced today that they havesigned a Memorandum of Understanding for cooperation within the context ofLuxembourg’s SpaceResources.lu that aims to increase the commercial use of resources
gathered from celestial bodies such as asteroids or from the moon.
Within this partnership, ispace intends to develop, through its European office based in
Luxembourg, several key technical services including payload development and engineering
integration and support. The Luxembourg Government will co-fund relevant research anddevelopment activities in this field, such as the ispace roving spectrometer project, whichaims to bring an innovative mass spectrometer developed by the Luxembourg Institute ofScience and Technology (LIST) to the surface of the moon to explore elemental and isotopic
compositions of lunar ice and regolith.
The company ispace Europe SA will be hosted in Luxembourg City within the Paul Wurth
InCub House which offers, in cooperation with the national business incubator
Technoport®, a dedicated support program for innovative and technology-drivencompanies.
Luxembourg Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Economy, Étienne Schneider,stated: “The Luxembourg Government forges ahead with the SpaceResources.lu initiative.
With ispace from Japan, we already welcome the third foreign company which chose ourcountry as a European hub for developing highly advanced technologies and capabilities
like robotics for mining resources in space. The partnership with an international renowned
research organization and with a key player of the local innovation ecosystem offers ispacea promising starting position as a new actor in the Luxembourg space sector.”‘It is a great honor to collaborate with Luxembourg and to be the first space resourcecompany to be recognized for our focus on the Moon. We see the Moon as a strategic
stepping stone to further spur human activity in space,” said Takeshi Hakamada, CEO ofispace and the leader of team HAKUTO, one of the finalists of the Google Lunar XPRIZE.
“With strong technological, legal, and financial support, we are convinced thatLuxembourg is the best place for us to begin our European operations.”PRESS“The development of technology solutions for the space sector is a key area of theMaterials and Technology Department (MRT) of the Luxembourg Institute of Science andTechnology," stated Prof. Jens Kreisel, Director of the MRT-LIST. “Within this strategy, thepresent collaboration with ispace is an excellent fit for us," adds Dr. Tom Wirtz, who heads
the Advanced Instrumentation for Ion Nano-Analytics (AINA) group at LIST. "We have amass spectrometry technology that is of major interest for space applications, and ispace
has unique means to deploy this technology to space.”
Georges Rassel, CEO of Paul Wurth, commented: “In the frame of our engineering activities
beyond the traditional iron & steel industry, Paul Wurth is constantly looking forcooperating with young technology-driven companies. Given the increasing scarcity ofmineral reserves, we have a natural interest in the development of innovative technicalsolutions allowing to explore resources, which today seem out of reach. We are therefore
extremely delighted to welcome ispace inc. at our incubation program Paul Wurth InCuband we are looking forward to the challenges lying ahead.
On February 8, 2016, Luxembourg announced the SpaceResources.lu initiative to support
the commercialization of space resource development. With this initiative, Luxembourg
aims to become a European hub for space resource exploration and utilization.

###About ispace, Inc.
ispace is a space robotics company focused on developing miniaturized technology todiscover, map, and utilize resources in space. ispace designs, manufactures, and managesrobotics for Team Hakuto, a front running Google Lunar XPRIZE team. ispace and Team
Hakuto are sending the first privately developed micro-rover to the Moon in 2017 in anattempt to win the $20M XPRIZE and conduct preliminary prospecting activities. For more
information, please visit: http://ispace-inc.com/