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Q. If the competition between the different space organizations or contractors is a good thing, how can JAXA encourage that as the only space agency in Japan? I can think of several ways. I would think that by having a single JAXA now there's an opportunity that wasn't there before, when ISAS was here and NASDA was there, both fiercely independent and perhaps with some reluctance to collaborate in depth. They cooperated okay, but perhaps didn't feel comfortable going much further. It was either an ISAS mission or a NASDA mission. Now JAXA can say, "Hey, they are now all JAXA missions and we are going to use the best resources available, and just to be sure, we're going to have a little competition. First, we are going to open up the project review process more broadly, involving serious participation across internal JAXA boundaries. Then, we're going to let some of the engineers and scientists and industrial partners of NASDA compete on the space science side. And we're going to let some of the scientists and engineers and industrial partners of ISAS compete for some low-cost earth observation missions, or instruments, for example." That's only a hypothetical example; and I am not at all sure it is a good one. Such limited and managed competition might be helpful in optimizing the performance and minimizing the overall cost of Japanese space missions. The very existence of competition makes people think more carefully about what they're doing. A second part of managed competition requires assuring that there is industrial competition along with the ability for individual companies to compete widely. When I was in Japan extensively in the 1990s, I tried to understand the relationship of the Japanese aerospace contractors to the ISAS and NASDA projects. The mechanisms for managing industrial contractors there seemed to me to be very different than they are in the United States, again reflecting cultural differences, perhaps, and the rather small size of the aerospace base there. It seemed to me that the same contractors were usually involved with the bulk of each institution's projects. It's not clear to me that there is in Japan the maximum amount of competition between the different capable contractors that there could be, because of the need for each government agency to have dedicated, long-term contractor support always, and sometimes even when they can't pay for it. This might be especially true in the early conception and design phase (Phase A in the U.S.), when the institutions there may not have enough funds budgeted for Phase A work. And so it might mean a revised budgeting process within JAXA, which would make more money available early to define possible project concepts and how they are going to be implemented, in order to have an open competition once these requirements have been established. In the U.S., such early studies (Phase A) for successful missions typically cost approximately 5 per cent of the total. JPL and other NASA centers have explicitly budgeted funds for that purpose, and also can award small contracts to different contractors to get the best mix of ideas. Also, during that same Phase A, the government organization determines how the job is going to get done - how much contractor work and how much in house. I don't know Japan well enough to say too much about this subject, and I'm not comfortable because Japan has done very well in so many things. But competition is important, and how it gets worked out is important. Also, because there has been no Japanese defense space program, the industrial aerospace base is relatively smaller than in the U.S., which may make managed competition more difficult to implement in Japan. The U.S. experienced these kinds of complexities in space development during the massive downsizing of U.S. military efforts in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War, and the consequent reduction in both the number and capacity of its aerospace contractors. |
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Finally and perhaps an even bigger issue that JAXA may wish to consider is how to establish renewed policy guidance at the highest levels, governing just how much foreign collaboration is in Japan's interest. I think it's harder for smaller groups to do that, but now that JAXA is the single representative for civil space, perhaps they can expedite government policy considerations. Foreign collaboration is a big question in Japan, as in all space-faring nations. There is a natural tendency everywhere to want to do everything in one's own country so as to get broad experience. Yet, when you think about it, if you have a mission which you would like to do, say going to Mars and even landing there, for example, by teaming up with another country you get their contractors competing for some part of that mission, which normally would be financially supported by your partner country. So you can broaden the industrial base available for that mission without increasing your overall expenditures. Let me add something else. And again I feel uneasy doing this because I am an outsider. I only have an outsider's view, even though I'm very supportive and sympathetic. When I was there in the '90s I used to go around and ask individual space scientists and engineers, "What's your goal? What are you trying to do in space?" Their answer was usually "catch up." That slogan is very easy to understand, because after World War II and the terrible destruction that took place, Japanese society mobilized fantastically well to catch up, first in manufacturing consumer goods and then eventually in more advanced technology. That worked well especially during those times when the U.S. and Soviet Union had their deadly serious nuclear-armed stand-off. Japan grew very nicely, not having to bear the heavy cost of defense and things like that. But that period is over. The Cold War ended in 1989-91, just about the time the "bubble" burst in Tokyo. So there needs to be a new mantra, a new idea about what Japan's space effort is about. And maybe that's part of the current problem. The principal criticism of the commission investigating the Columbia failure was that America did not have a contemporary purpose or a goal for its human flight program. Well, to some extent Japan's space program as a whole seems to me to suffer from a similar absence of a widely understood and contemporary goal for its objectives in space. I remember in 1994 there was a "Vision Paper" produced by the Space Activities Commision under Professor Nomura's leadership, which laid out a long-range program to explore and maybe utilize the Moon, first robotically and eventually with humans. But such an ambitious objective doesn't seem to be the driving force of contemporary Japanese space activities. What is? As long as "catching up" was the mantra, it was simple, and wonderful things happened. But you've grown up. You're a big, technologically advanced country now. Other big countries in the world, like the United States and Russia and Europe; are struggling also with very difficult questions about their roles in the world of the 21st Century. What do you want to be true about Japan in 20 or 40 or 60 years from now? And how should Japanese space activities help achieve that vision? So maybe JAXA can also help now as a larger organization to get discourse among the people and among the government concerning, "What are we really trying to do in space?" It has to be more than just catching up. You will fall further behind in space if you don't embrace the challenge and risk of new, demanding objectives. JAXA must help develop a public and government constituency in Japan with enthusiasm, to try new daring things in space.
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