Tim Furniss/LONDON
THE JAPANESE space programme has been hit by its second major failure in five months, with the loss of the $160 million Experimental Recoverable Space System (Express) microgravity research satellite, after launch from the Kagoshima space centre on 15 January.
The second stage of the eighth M3SII solid-propellant booster malfunctioned and the 760kg German-Japanese spacecraft, with a 400kg recoverable module, was placed into a lower orbit than planned, with a low point of only 120km. It was from there that the Express plunged into the atmosphere, falling into the Pacific Ocean, reportedly on its third orbit on 16 January.
On 28 August, 1994, the Japanese National Space Development Agency's (NASDA) $415 million Engineering Test Satellite, ETS 6, was left stranded in quasi-geostationary transfer orbit after an apogee-engine malfunction. It had been launched successfully on NASDA's second H2 booster.
The Institute for Space and Astronautical Sciences (ISAS), which manages the Express project, with Germany's Deutsche Agentur fur Raumfahrtangelegenheiten (DARA), has admitted the failure of its M3SII booster.
The Express - built by Daimler Benz's ERNO division and OHB System - was designed to be the first of a potential series of commercial, recoverable microgravity-research missions to be launched on the new NASDA/ISAS J1 launcher. The spacecraft is based on the 2m-long, 1.4m-diameter Russian Fractional Orbital Bombardment System warhead and Salyut space-station recoverable capsule.
Germany (which purchased the capsule from Russia) and Japan equipped the Express with 128kg of experiments which were to have been recovered after a parachute landing at Australia's Woomera test range on 20 January.
Japan's next space launch will be the ISAS Space Flyer Unit (SFU) aboard NASDA's third H2 booster from the Tanegashima space centre on 22 February. This launch had been delayed from January because of a leak in the tubing of the reaction-control system.
The 4,000kg SFU 1, the first craft to be used in a series of five missions costing more than $460 million, will carry microgravity experiments from ISAS and NASDA, and will be recovered from orbit by the Space Shuttle STS72/Endeavour in November.
The ETS 6 satellite has been used to verify an ion engine, nickel-hydrogen battery and an electrothermal-hydrazine thruster and has provided useful space-environmental data, despite being in an orbit useless for its planned communications-technology demonstrations, says NASDA.
NASDA's Spacelab payload specialist Takao Doi has joined NASA's 1995 astronaut class as a mission specialist to train for operations aboard the Japanese Experiment Module of the Alpha space station.
Source: Flight International
