[3] The project began with engineer Andrew Barton in 2008, who sought to win the Google Lunar X Prize by landing a privately-funded rover on the Moon, and gathered an international group of professionals to create White Label Space.

[2][7][8] The lander also housed another payload, a music disc featuring the song ‘SORATO’ by the Japanese rock band Sakanaction, which was initially released in 2018 as a part of the Team Hakuto campaign for the Google Lunar X Prize.

[5][9] In an effort to conserve fuel, the mission used a slower path to approach the Moon, entering lunar orbit in March 2023.

[2][10] During the official live-stream,[11] among the four possible landing locations, the site in Lacus Somniorum was initially shown in the animation, saying it was based on real-time telemetry from the lander; that later turned out to be misleading, since the telemetry coming from the lander was not reliable, and the actual attempted landing site was near Atlas crater, as had been decided initially.

This happened because the onboard computer wrongly assumed the radar altimeter was faulty, and ignoring its data, misjudged the actual altitude of the spacecraft and kept hovering 5km above the surface of the Moon.