TOKYO, June 6 (Reuters) - Japanese company ispace

is set to try the lunar touchdown of its uncrewed

spacecraft again on Friday two years after its failed inaugural

mission, in a bid to become the first company outside the United

States to achieve a moon landing.

Tokyo-based ispace hopes to join U.S. firms Intuitive

Machines ( LUNR ) and Firefly Aerospace, which have accomplished

commercial landings amid an intensifying global race for the

moon that includes state-run missions from China and India.

Resilience, ispace's second lunar lander, is expected to

touch down on Mare Frigoris, a basaltic plain about 900 km (560

miles) from the moon's north pole, at 4:17 a.m. Friday local

time (1917 GMT Thursday) following an hour-long descent from

lunar orbit, according to the company.

In 2023, ispace's first lander crashed into the moon's

surface due to inaccurate recognition of its altitude. Software

remedies have been implemented, while the hardware design is

mostly unchanged in Resilience, the company has said.

Resilience carries a four-wheeled rover built by ispace's

Luxembourg subsidiary and payloads worth a total of $16 million,

including scientific instruments from Japanese firms and a

Taiwanese university.

If the landing is successful, the 2.3-metre-high lander and

the microwave-sized rover will begin 14-day exploration

activities until the arrival of a freezing-cold lunar night,

including capturing images of regolith, the moon's fine-grained

surface material, on a contract with U.S. space agency NASA.

Later on Friday, ispace will host a press conference about

the outcome of the mission, according to the company.

Shares in ispace more than doubled earlier this year on

growing investor hopes for the second mission, before calming in

recent days.

Resilience in January shared a SpaceX rocket launch with

Firefly's Blue Ghost lander, which took a faster trajectory to

the moon and touched down successfully in March.

Intuitive Machines ( LUNR ), which last year marked the world's first

touchdown of a commercial lunar lander, made its second attempt

in March but the lander Athena ended on its side on the lunar

surface just as in the first mission.

Japan last year became the world's fifth country to achieve

a soft lunar landing after the former Soviet Union, the U.S.,

China and India, when the national Japan Aerospace Exploration

Agency (JAXA) achieved the touchdown of its SLIM lander, yet

also in a toppled position.

Despite President Donald Trump's

proposed changes

to the U.S. space policy, Japan remains committed to NASA's

Artemis moon program, pledging the involvement of

Japanese astronauts

and technologies for future lunar missions.

Including one in 2027 as part of the Artemis program,

ispace plans seven more missions in the U.S. and Japan through

2029 to capture increasing demands for lunar transportation.