Final pings of data in the moments before the planned touchdown showed the lander's speed rapidly increasing, leading engineers at mission control in Tokyo to determine a successful landing was "not achievable", Ispace said in a statement.
"We lost communication, so we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface," founder and Chief Executive Takeshi Hakamada said on a company live stream shortly after communication from the spacecraft ceased.
Success would have been a welcome change from recent setbacks Japan has faced in space technology, where it aims to build a domestic industry, including a goal of sending Japanese astronauts to the moon by the late 2020s.
But a lunar landing would be an ambitious feat for a private firm. Only the United States, the former Soviet Union and China have soft-landed spacecraft on the moon, with attempts in recent years by India and a private Israeli company ending in failure.
The Japanese firm "determined that there is a high probability that the lander eventually made a hard landing."
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