JAPAN’s accident-prone effort to develop a commercial space launcher
suffered another setback last week. Engineers aborted a test-firing of a
first-stage engine for the H-II rocket when the engine caught fire on its
test-bed at Tanegashima Space Centre in southern Japan.
The incident follows the formation of a consortium which will market
the H-II rocket commercially. The rocket, the first large liquid-fuelled
craft to be developed entirely by Japan, is designed to lift a satellite
weighing 2.2 tonnes into orbit. One of the consortium’s selling points will
be the reliability of Japanese rocket engineering.
