A JAPANESE spacecraft attempting a touchdown on the moon has crashed into the lunar surface, its company said.

The unmanned Resilience moon lander, from private Japanese astro company ispace, has been declared a failure for a second time.

Friday's flop follows a similar result during the company's first attempt at a moon landing in 2023.

Resilience was loaded up a four-wheeled rover and other tech worth a total of $16 million.

It had difficulty measuring the distance between itself and the moon, its makers said, so it bashed into the surface going too fast.

Mission control lost contact with it less than two minutes before the scheduled touchdown and blamed a "hard landing" for knocking out comms.

A bustling room of more than 500 employees and investors gathered in Tokyo to watch the

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