Tag: Japan

Japan’s space agency JAXA test flies and vertically lands a prototype first stage

9:27 am

Japan’s space agency JAXA today successfully completed a 40-second vertical take-off and landing of a small scale prototype Grasshopper first stage.

At its Noshiro testing center in Akita Prefecture, northeastern Japan, the RV-X test rocket slowly landed after rising about 11 meters and moving horizontally while maintaining a vertical position during its 40-second flight. JAXA found no major issues with the test rocket after the landing.

…The 7.3-meter-long, 1.8-meter-diameter test rocket, which uses liquid hydrogen fuel, is a prototype of the reusable first stage of future large rockets. [emphasis mine]

This is a typical government test program, like many at NASA. Private companies in general have moved away from the use of hydrogen as a fuel because of the difficulty of obtaining and managing it, moving instead to methane. Thus, this project is not tied to any specific financial goals, and will likely dies stillborn once it is complete.

It also illustrates how far behind Japan has fallen when compared to China. China is building multiple reusable rockets, has tested three with one landing successfully. Japan at present is struggling to get any of its three government and one private rockets off the ground.

3 comments

BepiColumbo’s team prepares for arrival at Mercury in the fall

12:36 pm

The arrival plan for BepiColombo
Click for original graphic.

After eight years of travel through the inner solar system to get to Mercury, the European/Japanese dual orbiter mission BepiColombo is finally getting close to arrival at Mercury in the fall, and the science team has been doing rehearsals to prepare for that orbital insertion.

Teams must align timelines, verify readiness criteria and maintain a common understanding of what constitutes a ‘go’ or ‘no-go’ decision. During one recent simulation, controllers were confronted with an anomaly that forced them to abort and re-schedule a planned separation scenario. “It generates continuous discussions and iterations between the different teams,” Nacho adds.

The exercise highlighted an essential aspect of Mercury arrival: success depends not only on operating the spacecraft, but on ESA and JAXA working together as one team.

That arrival is made more complicated in that BepiColombo is not a single orbiter. It is made up of the following parts:

  • The Mercury Transfer Module (MTM), which provided the service module and ion engines for the journey, including six fly-bys of Earth, two ofVenus, and six of Mercury
  • The Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) from the European Space Agency (ESA)
  • The Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio) from Japan’s space agency JAXA
  • The Mio Sunshield and Interface Structure (MOSIF), which protected everything during its journey in the inner solar system close to the Sun

The graphic to the right outlines the arrival plan. First the MTM must separate. Then the two orbiters enter Mercury orbit. Next Japan’s Mio separates and is deployed in its own orbit. Then the sunshield is ejected from Europe’s orbiter and it moves into its planned orbit.

As the spacecraft uses ion engines, with low but continuous thrust, these maneuvers can take weeks.

Both orbiters have complementary orbits to study different aspects of the planet. Europe’s orbiter will orbit closer to get a better look at the planet, while Japan’s Mio’s orbit is highly elliptical, to study the planet’s magnetic field.

During the journey to Mercury BepiColombo overcome several problems. First, the Covid panic threatened operations by limiting staffing and preventing normal behavior. Next the solar panels failed to produce the expected power, a problem that appears to still exist but which has not prevented operations. Finally, its thrusters produced less thrust than expected during a mid-course correction in 2024, causing an eleven month delay in arrival.

It is now however about to arrive. Let us hope that arrival proceeds as planned.

1 comment

Japan’s Ispace signs deal with SpaceX to use Starship for lunar cargo delivery

9:14 am

Ispace's mobile cargo system
Click for original.

The Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace yesterday announced it has signed an agreement with SpaceX to use its Starship lunar lander to transport cargo to the Moon’s surface.

The Ispace graphic to the right shows the company’s proposed “Mobile Cargo System” on the Moon after deployment from Starship.

In preparation for the new business offering, Ispace has secured 500 kilograms of payload capacity on Starship, scheduled for launch as early as 2030. Ispace is offering global customers with relatively small payload delivery needs, weighing 500 kilograms or less, a comprehensive service to integrate, transport and operate their payloads on the Moon.

As part of the integration process, Ispace will assess each customer’s payload requirements and implement the quality control necessary for lunar transportation. Ispace will then integrate multiple payloads into the dedicated “Mobile Cargo System” in development by the company and provide services, including interface coordination with Starship as part of the system. Upon landing on the Moon, Ispace aims to provide operational support through the “Mobile Cargo System” to ensure the smooth deployment of payloads onto the lunar surface, their movement across the lunar surface, and access to other infrastructure.

Ispace is clearly hoping this cargo system will be of interest to NASA for its Moonbase project. It is also something that will appeal to other commercial customers who want to get a payload to the Moon cheaply.

23 comments

Japan’s Hayabusa-2 successfully flies past asteroid Torifune

8:33 am

Torifune as seen by Hayabusa-2

Japan’s Hayabusa-2 asteroid probe successfully flew past the asteroid Torifune yesterday, getting less than 2,000 feet from its surface as it zipped past at a relative speed of more than 10,000 miles per hour.

The picture to the right is the first image released by Japan’s space agency, JAXA. It shows that Torifune appears to be a contact binary, made up of two rubble-pile asteroids that gentle fused together in their dance in space. Contact binaries are presently thought to comprise about 15% of all asteroids, but that estimate might prove to be an understatement as we gather more information. This is the first seen close-up that appears made up of two rubble piles.

While Japan’s press and its space agency touted this fly-by success loudly, both failed to mention the technical problems facing Hayabusa-2, which made the fly-by even more impressive. The spacecraft, which was launched in 2014, rendezvoused and grabbed samples from the asteroid Ryugu from 2018 to 2019, and then returned those samples to Earth in 2020, has been flying somewhat crippled. It has four ion engines for maneuvering, three of which no longer work and a fourth that is showing signs of failure. Thus, it could not do much during this fly-by to control its path or orientation. That it could grab this image as it zipped by is a testament to its engineers.

Hayabusa-2 is on its way to asteroid 1998 KY26 in 2031. Whether it will be capable of doing much when it gets there remains at this moment an unknown.

3 comments

Hayabusa-2 to fly past asteroid July 5, 2026

9:13 am

Ryugu's northern hemisphere
Ryugu as seen by Hayabusa-2 shortly before it grabbed
samples from the surface in 2019. Arrow indicates planned touchdown
site.

Despite having only one working ion engine, Japan’s Hayabusa-2 asteroid probe will do a fast and extremely close fly-by of the asteroid Torifune on July 5, 2026.

The flyby will see Hayabusa2 get within 1 to 10 kilometers (0.62 to 6.2 miles) of Torifune, using its instrument suite to study the roughly 450-meter-wide (1,476 feet) asteroid as it whizzes past at 5.3 kilometers per second (3.3 miles per second).

Not much is known about Torifune, so a fly-by this close carries risk. In addition, three of Hayabusa’s four ion engines no longer work, and the fourth is starting to degrade.

If successful, however, the fly-by will not only tell us something more about Torifune, it will increase the chances Hayabusa-2 can reach asteroid 1998 KY26 in 2031. That asteroid is small, only about 35 feet across. The plan would be for Hayabusa- to fly in formation for a period, and even attempt a touch down.

2 comments

Two launches today by Japan and SpaceX

8:47 am

The beat goes on! Even as SpaceX proceeds today with the largest initial public offering of stock ever, raising an expected $75 billion in cash for its long term plans, the global launch industry marched on with two launches today.

First, Japan’s space agency JAXA successfully launched its H3 rocket on a test flight following a launch failure in December 2025. The rocket lifted off from JAXA’s Tanegashima spaceport in southern Japan, using its simplest configuration, with no solid-fueled strap-on boosters. Though the rocket deployed some cubesats, its main payload was a dummy satellite to test the rocket’s deployment system, which caused the 2025 failure by not holding its satellite in place. On today’s launch, the deployment system worked as planned, which means JAXA can now resume operational launches with H3.

This was Japan’s first launch in 2026.

Next, SpaceX placed another 29 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The first stage completed its 27th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic (58 days after its previous flight).

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

70 SpaceX
36 China
8 Russia
8 Rocket Lab (plus two suborbital HASTE launches)

For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 70 to 63.

11 comments

Mitsubishi gets subsidy from Japan to develop its own orbital tug

9:52 am

The Japanese aerospace company Mitsubishi today announced that Japan’s Space Strategic Fund has awarded it a subsidy of an undisclosed amount to its develop its own orbital tug.

The goal is to develop an OTV [orbital transfer vehicle] that can respond flexibly to user needs, navigate between orbits, and load and release payloads in space without being limited to specific applications or transport routes. The company also aims to verify the feasibility of autonomous rendezvous, proximity operations and docking (RPOD) using physical AI and robotics for the safe and effective capture, handling and release of payloads in space.

The Space Strategic Fund was created by the Japanese government in 2023 as a ten year $6.6 billion program to encourage the growth of a private Japanese space sector, to essentially transition Japan from a government space program run and owned by its space agency JAXA to a independent and competing private sector, following the capitalism model.

That fund however was given to JAXA to manage, and so far it appears it has not moved aggressively to promote an independent sector. Inside, the awards it has given out so far have mostly been to either fund its own programs, or help its big space partners, such as Mitsubishi. This could change of course as privately-owned spacecraft begin garnering customers outside of JAXA. It is however taking a long time, and meanwhile Japan’s space industry continues to trail badly both China and India, and even South Korea. While these Asian companies are developing multiple rockets and spacecraft, Japan presently has no operational rockets, and its commercial space sector is barely alive.

1 comment

Japanese company NEC initiates its own orbital tug project

9:08 am

Having won a grant from Japan’s $6.6 billion strategic fund (designed to encourage private enterprise in space), the Japanese company NEC Corporation has now begun work on its own commercial orbital tug, which it dubs an Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV).

Moving forward, NEC plans to conduct market feasibility studies, conceptual design, and demonstrations for OTVs by the end of fiscal year 2027 to clarify the required functions and other specifications. Following this, NEC plans to begin development of a demonstration model in fiscal year 2028, with the goal of launching it and conducting in-space demonstrations in fiscal year 2032, and aims to bring the technology to practical use in the future.

While the overall goal makes sense, the timetable seems far too slow. By the time NEC is ready with its operational OTV in 2032, at least a half dozen tugs will have been in operation for at least three to five years. Already several tugs have flown missions, with several more in the pipeline. Moreover, these companies have found less demand for tugs than expected, and have been repurposing their technology to other purposes.

Regardless, it does appear Japan is beginning to use this strategic fund as intended, to encourage the development of a private space industry, independent of its government space agency JAXA.

1 comment

Rocket Lab launches satellites for Japan’s space agency JAXA

9:56 pm

Rocket Lab today successfully placed eight smallsats for Japan’s space agency JAXA, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two launchpads in New Zealand.

Because all of JAXA’s rockets are presently grounded due to technical failures, Japan’s space agency has had to turn to Rocket Lab. In fact, these eight satellites were originally supposed to launch on JAXA’s Epsilon-S rocket, which remains grounded after an explosion during a static fire test. There have been no updates on the status of Epsilon-S since December 2024.

Rocket Lab was also supposed to do a suborbital hypersonic test flight yesterday out of Wallops Island in Virginia, using the first stage of Election in its HASTE suborbital configuration. As this is a test for the War Department, little information is generally released. This video from a distance confirms the launch apparently took place, but whether it was a success or not remains unknown. That Rocket Lab’s announcers did not tout its success either before or after today’s JAXA launch — as they have routinely done in the past — suggests something might have gone wrong, though this too is pure speculation.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

48 SpaceX
21 China
6 Russia
6 Rocket Lab

For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 48 to 38.

10 comments

Japan to do test launch of its H3 rocket in June

1:28 pm

Japan’s space agency JAXA is now planning a test launch on June 10, 2026 of its H3 rocket, carrying a dummy payload only in order to test the changes it has made in the rocket after a failed launch in December 2025.

The failure of the eighth H3 rocket was likely caused by an adhesion problem in the satellite mounting structure, which led it to break apart during flight, according to an investigation by JAXA. Similar issues were found in other units, prompting the space agency to fix them so the components can maintain their structural integrity.

In the June launch, a dummy satellite will be mounted on the test vehicle to collect data and verify the effectiveness of the measures. For future launches of actual satellites or space probes, JAXA plans to review the mounting structure design to reduce the risk of failure.

In other words, the method for attaching the payload to the rocket at some points failed, so that the satellite separated prematurely. The June launch will be to test a new mounting system.

Posting has been light the last few days as I deal with recovery from knee surgery.

0 comments

Astroscale to fly mission to rendezvous and inspect two different satellites

8:01 am

Screen capture of ISSA-J1 operations around ALOS
Click for full animation.

The Japanese orbital tug company Astroscale this week announced a 2027 mission to fly an inspector satellite to rendezvous and inspect closely two different defunct satellites in different orbits.

The ISSA-J1 mission will inspect two retired Japanese satellites launched in the early 2000s. By approaching them in orbit, ISSA-J1 will observe their current condition more than 20 years after launch, including their attitude, rotation behavior and signs of degradation. The mission will conduct close‑range observations of multiple objects, closer than traditional monitoring methods, demonstrating new possibilities for on‑orbit inspection services.

The screen capture graphic to the right shows ISSA-J1’s proximity flight path around the first defunct satellite, ALOS, which was an Earth resource satellite that operated from 2006 to 2011. After completing its inspection of ALOS, it will then move into a higher orbit to inspect ADEOS‑II, another Earth observation satellite that operated in 2003.

Astroscale has already demonstrated it can do these kinds of inspection missions with its ADRAS-J mission, which flew within fifty feet of an abandoned rocket upper stage. Its eventual goal is to do space junk removal missions, grabbing this kind of space junk and de-orbiting it.

0 comments

Japan’s lunar lander startup Ispace wins contract with Korean rover startup

9:18 am

Artist rendering of Ispace's Ultra lunar lander
Artist rendering of Ispace’s Ultra lunar lander

The Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace has won a new customer for its next attempt to soft-land on the Moon, with the South Korean startup Unmanned Exploration Laboratory (UEL) signing a contract to put its proposed two-wheeled rover on that mission.

Under the terms of the agreement, the UEL rover will be integrated as a commercial payload on ispace’s ULTRA lunar lander for Mission 3, currently scheduled to launch in 2028. The mission would mark the first Korean rover to explore the Moon’s surface and underscores the growing commercial collaboration between Japan and Korea in the aerospace industry.

Mission 3 will serve as the inaugural flight for ispace’s ULTRA lunar lander.

Ispace so far has a very mixed record. It has successfully gotten two landers to the Moon, but both failed just before landing. It has also recently had to delay its lander mission for NASA because it had to replace the lander’s engine, the previous engine found to be inadequate.

Ultra is Ispace’s new larger lander design, intended to fly on all future missions. It remains untested in flight. The company presently has lander contracts for the following missions:

  • 2028: a Japanese mission funded by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry
  • 2029: a Japanese mission funded by Japan’s Space Strategy Fund (designed at encouraging the private space sector
  • 2030: NASA’s mission, being built in partnership with the American company Draper

At the moment, everything about Ispace remains tentative. It needs to finally land something on the Moon to truly establish itself.

2 comments

Japanese rocket startup Interstellar gets another $47 million grant from Japan

8:58 am

The Japanese rocket startup Interstellar last week announced it has been awarded a new $47 million grant from Japan’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, in addition to the $53 million awarded in earlier grants.

The SBIR is a 3-phased governmental program aimed to promote the implementation of advanced technologies developed by startups in Japan. Interstellar was selected in September 2023 under the space section focused on the “Development and Demonstration of Private Launch Vehicles”, a project spanning for 5 years, from September 2023 to March 2028. After being selected as one of the four participating companies, Interstellar became one of three companies to pass the Phase 1 review in September 2024.

In this latest round, Interstellar is one of only two companies to pass, moving into the 3rd and final phase, which includes flight demonstration. Including the funds of the previous phases the total amount has reached a maximum of 15.4 billion JPY ( 98.97 million USD).

The company has also raised a little under $130 million in private investment capital, and has also signed contracts placing seven satellites on the first launch of its proposed Zero rocket. That launch was originally supposed to occur in 2025, but did not. No new launch date has been set, though this new grant suggests the company is getting close, though I also doubt it will occur in 2026.

At the moment Japan has no launch capability, as the two rockets controlled by its space agency JAXA are both grounded due to launch failures. It has several startups trying to build their own rockets, but none has succeeded as yet. The only one to attempt a launch, Space One, has tried three times to reach orbit with its Kairos rocket, all failures.

1 comment

Private mission to Apophis gets another customer, two student-built landers

1:43 pm

Apophis' path past the Earth in 2029
A cartoon (not to scale) showing Apophis’s
path in 2029.

The orbital tug startup Exlabs has signed up a second payload customer to fly on its private ApophisExL mission to rendezvous with the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis when it makes its April 13, 2029 close fly-by of the Earth.

ExLabs has announced its partnership with Japan’s Chiba Institute of Technology (ChibaTech) and its Planetary Exploration Research Center (PERC) to send university-led payloads to the surface of asteroid Apophis during its rare near-Earth flyby in 2029. ApophisExL is the world’s first commercial deep-space rideshare and is supported by mission design and operations collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) operated by Caltech.

Under the leadership of planetary scientist and PERC Director, Dr. Tomoko Arai, ChibaTech students and researchers are developing two landing payloads to be deployed on the asteroid’s surface.

An Australian satellite startup, Fleet Space Technologies, had already signed on to fly a mapping instrument on ApophisExL.

Though the press release at the link calls this private mission “a new model,” using private enterprise rather than relying on the government for doing planetary missions, it actually harks back to the way things were done in the U.S. before World War II, when the private sector did most of this pure research. In fact, as late as the 1960s there was at least one company, American Science and Engineering, doing the first X-ray astronomical observations flying suborbital rockets. It later won contracts from NASA and other agencies to help build several later orbiting X-ray telescopes.

Over time the government space agencies became dominant, so that most of this design work was either done by them or by universities, with private companies relegated to the roles of minor subcontractors.

This new model is simply an extension of the capitalism model that is taking over the entire space industry, shifting power and ownership from big, expensive, and inefficient government programs to small, cheap, and economical private missions. Those space agencies can still do missions, but they do it by buying payload space on these private missions.

Below is a list of the missions going to Apophis in 2029:
» Read more

2 comments

Scientists detect the five chemicals that make up DNA/RNA inside Ryugu samples

11:05 am

Ryugu's northern hemisphere
Ryugu as seen by Hayabusa-2 shortly before it grabbed
samples from the surface. Arrow indicates planned touchdown
site.

Scientists studying the samples brought back from the asteroid Ryugu by Japan’s probe Hayabusa-2 have found therein a full set of the five fundamental chemicals that make up either DNA or RNA: adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil. From the paper’s [pdf] abstract:

Organic molecules delivered from extraterrestrial materials may have played a key role in supplying building blocks for life on Earth. Here we report all five canonical nucleobases—purines (adenine and guanine) and pyrimidines (cytosine, thymine and uracil)—in samples returned from the C-type asteroid (162173) Ryugu by JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission and compare the results with data from similar extraterrestrial material.

Ryugu samples contain nearly equal amounts of purines and pyrimidines, whereas Murchison is enriched in purines and Bennu and Orgueil in pyrimidines. Samples from Ryugu, Bennu and Orgueil, which have a similar mineralogy and elemental composition, show purine-to-pyrimidine ratios negatively correlating with ammonia.

These observations indicate that the nucleobases in these samples may have formed via a shared pathway depending on the physicochemical environment of the respective parent bodies. The detection of diverse nucleobases in asteroid and meteorite materials demonstrates their widespread presence throughout the Solar System and reinforces the hypothesis that carbonaceous asteroids contributed to the prebiotic chemical inventory of early Earth.

In other words, the data from these samples suggests that the formation of life on Earth was greatly aided by the deposition of these carbon molecules from asteroids onto the Earth.

At the same time, some caution must be exercised. At present we only have samples from three asteroids, one of which (Orgueil) was obtained shortly after it crashed on Earth. It will take a much larger census of many in-space asteroids to confirm this hypothesis.

5 comments

Third launch attempt by Japanese rocket startup Space One fails

8:17 pm

Kairos rocket just after failure

In another attempt to do the maiden launch its orbital Kairos rocket today, the Japanese rocket startup Space One experienced its third launch failure, with the rocket breaking up about a minute after launch.

The screen capture to the right shows the rocket just after failure. The cloud arc in the upper left is the moment some burst occurred. Within seconds it was clear that the rocket was now in several pieces.

The launch attempt, which took place from the company’s own spaceport, Spaceport Kii, on the southern coast of the main island of Japan, was the third failure in a row, all involving failures of the first stage. The first launch in March 2024 blew up mere seconds after launch. The second attempt in December 2024 failed about 90 seconds after launch when the rocket began to spiral out of control.

This third launch appeared more controlled, but it also occurred only a minute after launch.

Whether the company can survive a third straight failure, none of which got even close to main engine cutoff and stage separation, is unknown. The company has some major investors, including Canon, several major Japanese banks, and the government-owned Development Bank of Japan. While they might stick with the company, it would not be surprising if there was a major shake-up in management.

Japan at the moment has no operational launch capability. Space One is its only private rocket startup, while the two rockets belonging to its space agency JAXA, H3 and Epsilon, are both grounded due to launch failures.

4 comments

Japanese rocket startup Space One to attempt third orbital launch this weekend

10:39 am

Japanese spaceports
Japanese spaceports indicated by red dots

UPDATE: Launch scrubbed due to weather. No new launch date as yet been announced.

The Japanese rocket startup Space One has now scheduled the third launch attempt of its Kairos rocket for this coming Sunday, March 1, 2026, lifting off from its private Spaceport Kii launchpad.

Space One said Friday that it would launch the No. 3 unit of its Kairos small rocket carrying artificial satellites on Sunday morning. The Tokyo-based space development startup canceled the initially scheduled launch on Wednesday, citing a forecast for unfavorable weather conditions.

According to Space One, the Kairos No. 3 unit is set to lift off from the company’s Spaceport Kii launch site in the town of Kushimoto, Wakayama Prefecture, between around 11 a.m. and 11:20 a.m. on Sunday. The rocket will carry five satellites, including one developed by the Taiwan Space Agency.

The two previous launch attempts, in March and December 2024, both failed almost immediately after launch.

A success now by this private company is crucial for Japan, as its government-owned H3 and Epsilon rockets are both grounded due to launch failures.

0 comments

Stephen Sondheim – Someone in a Tree

6:01 pm

An evening pause: For my birthday, a repost of a 2010 evening pause of one of my favorite Broadway songs, from Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, which I only recently learned was his favorite song as well.

It tells the story of a significant moment in history, the moment when Japan’s leaders signed their first international treaty in 1852 with the United States, but from the point of view of outside witnesses. Its point is profound, that history is not just made by the leaders who sign the deals, but by every individual who makes up the whole of human society.

It’s the fragment, not the day
It’s the pebble, not the stream
It’s the ripple, not the sea
That is happening.
Not the building but the beam
Not the garden but the stone
Only cups of tea
And history
And someone in a tree.

0 comments

JAXA releases preliminary results of investigation into December 2025 H3 rocket launch failure

8:01 am

Japan's space agency JAXA

JAXA yesterday released the preliminary results of its investigation into upper stage failure during the December 2025 launch of its H3 rocket.

Previously the agency had indicated it believed the cause was linked to the separation of the rocket’s payload fairings. This new report changes that conclusion:

After liftoff, the No. 8 H3 rocket sustained damage to the section where the Michibiki No. 5 positioning satellite was mounted, when the satellite cover, called fairing, was separated.

In addition, the fuel tubing of the rocket’s second-stage engine was damaged, presumably causing combustion to stop earlier than planned, JAXA said in a progress report on its investigation into the failure at a meeting of a subgroup of a science ministry panel.

As the section was damaged, the satellite was no longer attached to the second stage of the rocket. The satellite fell off when the first stage separated.

In other words, as the fairings released, the satellite apparently deployed, damaging the fuel feed to the upper stage engine. It is as yet unclear whether the deployment system worked as intended, but did so prematurely, or if it failed entirely, allowing the satellite to fall away once the fairings separated.

At the moment Japan has no launch capability. Both of JAXA’s rockets, the H3 and the Epsilon-S are grounded due to launch failures. Meanwhile, the country has only recently begun to develop private launch companies, none of which are ready to launch.

1 comment

Japanese rocket startup Interstellar raises another $129.7 million in private investment capital

9:11 am

The Japanese rocket startup Interstellar announced late last week that it has successfully raised another $129.7 million in private investment capital, bringing its total available cash to $287.7 million.

Interstellar’s Series F round represents one of the largest fundraising to date by a privately held space startup in Japan2, bringing Interstellar’s cumulative funding to 44.6 billion JPY (287.7 million USD). The round, led by Woven by Toyota, raised 14.8 billion JPY (95.5 million USD) through a third-party allotment of preferred shares in an up-round.

In addition, the company secured 5.3 billion JPY (34.2 million USD) in debt financing from financial institutions, including 1.8 billion JPY (11.6 million USD) in loan facilities with stock acquisition rights provided by the Japan Finance Corporation. Alongside the fundraising, secondary transactions with existing shareholders were also conducted to optimize the company’s capital structure. Nomura Securities provided advisory support in this series, including the introduction of several potential investors, some of which resulted in fundraising.

Interstellar was one of the earliest rocket startups, first attempting a suborbital launch in 2018. After that launch failed it then disappeared for almost five years to suddenly reappear last year with major funding from Toyota and other sources.

It had previously hoped to complete the first launch of its Zero orbital rocket in 2025. At the moment however the company has set no new launch date, though it has announced that it has seven customer payloads for that launch.

2 comments
1 2 3 … 25