Space Effort in Japan Gets a Lift

[zavvy]

<b>Space Effort in Japan Gets a Lift</b><br /><br />LINK<br /><br />A 16-story-high rocket blasted into the tropical night here on Saturday, firmly placing Japan back in Asia's space race.<br /><br />The successful launch and deployment of a weather satellite over the Pacific from this remote island 650 miles southwest of Tokyo restored morale to a rocketry program battered by its rival in China, which launched an astronaut into orbit in 2003 and plans to orbit satellites around the moon in 2007.<br /><br />Three of Japan's previous 13 launches ended in failure. In November 2003, Japan's dreams of entering the commercial satellite launch business evaporated when the last H2-A rocket launched from here failed to reach orbit and was aborted in a fireball over the Pacific.<br /><br />"With the previous failure, Japanese people's trust was shaken, and international credibility was lost," Education Minister Nariaki Nakayama said here after the launch. "At the moment of this launch, my heart swelled to bursting. Forty minutes after the launch, when I heard the satellite was detached safe and sound, I felt relief."<br /><br />Before the launch, the Tokyo newspaper Asahi Shimbun warned that this launch "could mark the make or break of the nation's space program."<br /><br />Without participation by the military to absorb costs, Japan's civilian rocketry program is seen as too costly and too unreliable to win private contracts to launch satellites.<br /><br />"The H-2A was to be their independent rocket that was to take them into the commercial market," Joan Johnson-Freese, chairwoman of the National Security Decision Making Department at the Naval War College, said by telephone from Rhode Island last week. "But it was plagued from the beginning with technical problems, cost overruns, shortage of customers. The Japanese are ending up with a rocket all dressed up and nowhere to go."<br /><br />"Juxtap