Failed maiden flight of Japanese launcher

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The Japanese space agency Jaxa has suffered another major setback. Although the new H3 launcher initially took off from Tanegashima Cosmodrome as planned on Tuesday, technical problems arose shortly after launch. After about ten minutes, Jaxa ordered the missile to self-destruct. In mid-February, a first start attempt had already been canceled due to an engine failure.

This time, the velocity dropped unusually sharply shortly after the first and second stage separated. There was no confirmation at the time that the second stage had ignited. The control center then ordered the missile to self-destruct as there was “no longer any possibility of completing the mission”.

Without confirmation of the second stage firing, the missile would not have been able to reach its planned trajectory, Jaxa vice president Yasuhiro Funo said at a news conference. The space agency now wants to investigate the causes of the malfunction in detail. She did not give a date for the next start attempt.

On board the H3 was the Earth observation satellite Alos-3, whose high-resolution images would be used, among other things, for disaster management and other monitoring tasks.

The successor to the Japanese H2-A launcher is designed for more frequent commercial launches. It must be cheaper and more reliable than its predecessors and thus compete with other launch vehicles such as the Falcon 9 from the American company SpaceX.

According to Japanese media, Jaxa and the manufacturer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries have already invested the equivalent of more than 1.5 billion euros in the H3 project since 2014. The first flight of the 63-meter-tall and 574-tonne rocket was originally planned for the Japanese financial year 2020/21, but was postponed due to technical problems.

As early as October last year, the Jaxa should have ordered the self-destruct of a smaller Epsilon-6 launcher shortly after launch. For the Jaxa, this was the first failed missile launch since 2003. (AFP)

Source: Blick