The company, which has a probe already en route for the moon, raised 6.7 billion yen ($50 million) in an initial public offering (IPO). Shares of ispace were last bid at 293 yen on the Tokyo exchange's growth market, 15% above their IPO price of 254 yen. The start-up, which has a contract with NASA to ferry payloads to the moon from 2025 and is targeting building a permanently staffed lunar colony by 2040, aims to be the first commercial company to land a probe on the moon.

In December its Hakuto-R Mission 1 lunar lander was launched aboard a SpaceX rocket that took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying two robotic rovers.

ispace said in a statement on Wednesday it expects the lander to touch down on the moon's surface on April 26 at the earliest.

(Reporting by Rocky Swift and David Dolan; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell)

By Rocky Swift