Comparison of Asian national space programs to fuel future energy demands in Asia. All three main Asian space powers plan to send men to the Moon in the distant future and have already sent lunar probes. Japan was the first Asian country to launch a lunar probe. The Hiten (Japanese: "flying angel") spacecraft (known before the launch as MUSES-A), built by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of Japan, was launched on 24 January 1990. In many ways, the mission did not go as was planned. Kaguya, the second Japanese lunar orbiter spacecraft, was launched on 14 September 2007. China launched its first lunar probe,
Explorer 33 Explorer 33 Explorer 33 (also known as AIMP-D, IMP-D, AIMP 1, Anchored IMP 1, Interplanetary Monitoring Platform-D) was a spacecraft in the Explorer program launched by NASA on July 1, 1966 on a mission of scientific exploration. Originally intended for a lunar orbit, mission controllers worried that the spacecraft's trajectory was too fast to guarantee lunar capture. Consequently, mission managers opted for a backup plan of placing the craft into an eccentric Earth orbit with a perigee of 265,679 km and an apogee of 480,762 km — still reaching distances beyond the Moon's orbit. Despite not attaining the intended lunar