The launch of a Japanese rocket carrying several satellites failed on Wednesday due to a “positioning” problem and the craft consequently received and applied a self-destruct order, announced the Japanese space agency Jaxa.
This is the first failed launch since 2003 for Jaxa and the first for its Epsilon rocket, a solid-fuel model whose (unmanned) flights began in 2013. Jaxa abruptly interrupted the live broadcast of the launch on Wednesday morning of Epsilon-6 from its space center in Uchinoura, in the Kagoshima prefecture (southwest of Japan), without initially giving any explanation.
A self-destruct signal was sent to the rocket less than 10 minutes after liftoff due to “positioning anomalies”, said Jaxa’s Yasuhiro Funo, who led the project. During a press conference, he explained that the technical problem had been detected before the third and final stage of the launch, just when the last powerful thruster was about to be ignited.
First failure since 2003
“We ordered the rocket destroyed because if we can’t get it into the intended orbit, we don’t know where it’s going,” he said. Such a scenario would have involved an uncontrolled fallout of the rocket and therefore a danger. After the failure, pieces of the rocket fell into the sea east of the Philippines, he said.
Epsilon-6 notably carried a Japanese satellite called RAISE-3, which was to remain in orbit around the Earth for at least a year to conduct experiments, as well as eight microsatellites. Japan’s previous failure in space in 2003 involved another of its rockets, H2-A, which was to launch two spy satellites to monitor North Korea.
A major civilian and military space program
Jaxa Chairman Hiroshi Yamakawa apologized for Wednesday’s failure, saying his agency was “terribly sorry for not being able to meet the expectations of the Japanese people.” “We will make every effort to find the cause and take countermeasures” to prevent this from happening again, he assured.
The 26m-tall, over 95-ton rocket was smaller than Japan’s previous liquid-fueled model. It had succeeded another solid fuel launcher called “MV”, abandoned in 2006 due to its high costs.
Japan is one of the countries with a major civilian and military space program. It also regularly sends astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). The Japanese Koichi Wakata is also part of the last crew of astronauts who joined the ISS last week with a ship from the American company SpaceX.
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