Rocketplane’s Japanese customer

Speaking of Rocketplane, I have an article about the company’s first microgravity research customer, a Japanese organization called HASTIC (Hokkaido Aerospace Science and Technology Incubation Center), in this week’s issue of The Space Review. This got a little attention back in February when HASTIC officials were honored by the Oklahoma legislature, but after talking with both Rocketplane and HASTIC officials at the FAA/AST Commercial Space Transportation Conference a short time after the Oklahoma event, I found a very interesting story. The president of HASTIC, Ryojiro Akiba, has been working on Japanese space efforts since effectively the very beginning, with sounding rocket flights in the mid-1950s. And the Rocketplane connection was made almost literally by accident: Rocketplane’s Chuck Lauer was a last-minute addition to a symposium HASTIC was organizing last summer, at which he discovered their need for microgravity research flight opportunities.

While the initial agreement between HASTIC and Rocketplane is devoted to microgravity research, Rocketplane wants to extend that to include space tourism flights from Hokkaido. That’s “a long-term proposition”, Lauer admitted, in part because Japan does not yet see space as something for the private sector, and among other things lacks a regulatory infrastructure like that in the US. Rocketplane, Japanese officials suggested, might be the 21t century equivalent of the “black ships” of Commodore Perry that opened Japanese ports to Western trade 150 years ago.