it's blindingly bright.

Where it isn't, it's pitch black.

The surface is covered in the finest particles of sand.

It's a tricky environment

for even the most advanced machines to navigate.

And before fleets of these things start roaming

the real moon, this engineer has many late nights ahead.

Perfecting this rover and testing it

on an artificial landscape like this one

will get us one step closer to establishing

the first human settlement away from Earth.

Discovery, roger, go for deploy.

One day when you and I make it up to the moon,

it could be thanks to her.

My name is Akane Imamura

and I built miniature lunar rover.

Going to the moon used to be something

only the biggest governments dreamed of.

But with the growing commercialization of space

some of the most exciting projects now

are taking place at startups.

And today I'm back in my hometown to visit one of them.

iSpace got its start in 2010 as a group of engineers

competing for the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE.

The competition expired last year without a winner.

But having raised more than $90 million

from Japan's government-backed funds and companies

including Japan Airlines, iSpace is now focused

on becoming a business in its own right.

So this is the rover?

Yeah, this is the rover.

And I'll tell ya,

Indy's never seen a driver like this.

When you think of a space rover,

you might think of the moon buggy

used in three of the Apollo missions.

There's a big crater.

They're the ones.

Or the Opportunity rover

that looked for water on Mars.

Next to these two hulking creations from previous decades,

iSpace's machine is so small it looks like a toy.

Flip it over?

Yeah.

Akane's team is racing against their deadline

of 2021 when a SpaceX rocket will blast iSpace's lander

carrying two rovers into orbit around the moon.

After a soft landing, each rover will roll out

and roam the lunar landscape, sending images, video,

and mapping data back to Earth.

Tomorrow Akane's team

will take one big step forward.

They're going to be taking

these two prototypes to a fake moon.

Akane's responsible

for the structural elements of the Rover.

And that involves everything from choosing

the best physical materials to make a lightweight

but still resilient machine to the thorny challenge

of designing the shape of these wheels.

Early the next morning we made our way

to the suburbs outside Tokyo.

And once the city's high-rises

give way to smaller neighborhoods

we reached our destination,

the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, known as JAXA.

Here on Earth this is the closest thing to the moon.

We have an hour, hour and a half of real testing

this morning with both Rover A and Rover B

doing their tests in parallel.

Make sure that we're logging and backing up all the data.

Okay, let's do it.

And after a few final preparations they started the tests.

At first was a series

of 10 meter crawls along flat ground.

With every run, Akane's team reconfigured the rover

to have a different weight distribution.

The plan was to see which versions

would be able to run straight.

And measure how much

the rogue ones would veer off-path.

And then it was the hardest part of the day,

the lunar hill climbs.

And with a chance to play a very tiny role

in establishing humanity's presence

on the moon, I couldn't resist.

Dear future lunar residents

and lunar tourists, you're welcome.

Bye bye.

Bye.

For about two days a week, Akane works from home.

And it's this flexibility that's helped her

balance a job as daunting as building a space rover--

With another equally demanding responsibility.

But in a country that has one

of the developed world's worst records on gender inequality,

Akane's success is still rare,

and even for her a pretty recent development.

Akane has a Master's in Mechanical Engineering

and her first job out of school involved research

on concrete and later on metals

at a big prestigious Japanese manufacturer.

She was one of very few female engineers

in an R&D department dominated by men.

Several times Akane considered

quitting work altogether and becoming a full-time housewife

while her husband pursued his career.

In 2017, Akane joined iSpace

as a spacecraft structure engineer.

The hectic nature of life at a startup

has come with its own challenges.

But in a company that's attracted young people

from countries like France, the US, and Canada

she says she's a lot happier now.

iSpace predicts its city on the moon

will be ready in 2040.

By then, with an estimated $1 trillion

global space industry to serve we'll have a whole generation

of engineers building machines

to explore the moon, Mars, and beyond.

Now that they've successfully completed their field tests,

Akane and her coworkers have been busy

analyzing all the data they collected

so they can start designing the next iteration of the rover.

Their first true milestone

will be the rover's launch day in two years' time.