Japan's Journey to Conquering Space: The Land of the Rising Sun Eyes Future Lunar Missions

December 6, 2020, the first success of Japan raced from deep space at roughly 26,000 mph dropping a capsule into the Earth's atmosphere before speeding away. The payload was later recovered in the Australian outback containing about 5 grams of materials from the nearby Ryugu asteroid.

The successful sample-return mission of Hayabusa2 was the first-ever success of Japan conquering space that no other country was able to do.

Japan's Space History

Japan's journey to conquering space began in the 1950s when research and development of various theories and space technologies kicked off the land of the rising sun. In the 1970s the Ohsumi research satellite was first launched making Japan the fourth to launch a domestic payload into orbit.

In 2003, a consolidation of the National Aerospace Laboratory, the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, and the National Space Development Agency of Japan became JAXA. Here, the iconic Hayabusa2 launch system and Epsilon put more satellites into orbit and more experiments.

Japan's space ecosystem evolved into a strategic national effort that focused on industry and security that brought life to the complex ecosystem beginning in the 2000s. Today, Japan is entering the third phase in its journey to conquering space. As of June 2020, Japan released a revision of the 'Basic Plan on Space Policy' stating to focus on four core areas: ensuring space security, national resilience and resolving global issues, contributing to disaster management, and creating new knowledge via space science and exploration reports SpaceNews.

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The Path To The Future

The Google Lunar XPRIZE aimed to spur affordable access to the moon while giving space entrepreneurs a platform to develop long-term models around lunar transportation and inspire the next generation of engineers, space explorers, and scientists to enter STEM fields.

The foundation challenged privately funded organizations to land on the moon, travel roughly 500 meters, and send back HD videos of the mission. Japan's team HAKUTO kept going after the competition and is set to launch a lunar mission on SpaceX's Falcon 9 in 2022.

Next year's mission aims for a soft lunar landing, while a second mission slated for 2023 aims to deliver another lander carrying a rover that will be deployed for lunar surface exploration. The initial model is to serve as a transport for customer payloads to the surface of the moon and fill the essential gap between lunar experimentation and space transportation.

CEO of iSpace managing the missions, Takeshi Hakamada says that as of yet there is no clear way to be certain how big the cislunar economy would be. But the team assumes that in the 2040s roughly 1,000 people would be living and working on the moon's surface, with about 10,000 people would be traveling to and from the moon.

Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft is now more than 122 million km from the planet on a 10-year path to reach the 1998 KY26 asteroid in 2031. More than a decade after making history of dropping Ryugu samples, it will again make history as the longest-lived and most traveled spacecraft.