H-IIB Launch to Inaugurate New Era in Japanese Rocket Effort

Japan: Fly Me to the Moon
Forbes

Japan’s $155 million launch, scheduled for the southern Tanegashima spaceport in the wee hours of September 11, is intended to showcase the new rocket that JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries spent the last five years building. It’s also likely to inject a new dimension into Asia’s ongoing rocket race, the latest salvo of which was South Korea’s planned satellite launch this week. Seoul’s hopes were first decried by Pyongyang, which saw its own recent rocket launch meet with U.N. sanctions. But technical glitches scrubbed the South Korean launch.

Japan’s rocket scientists have been working on the new rocket as a way to launch supply missions to the space station. This year, Japan released its first agenda for its space program, “stating for the first time very clearly that our nation wanted to have the technology to launch its own satellites and would ensure that such technology would be developed and maintained in Japan,” Nakamura told journalists at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan today.

In addition to national pride, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries hopes to sell rocket launches commercially, says Tomohiko Goto, deputy director of the company’s Nagoya Aerospace Systems Works, which is manufacturing the H-IIB rockets.

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