Our Missions - Introduction by JAXA Project Managers

Studies of Reusable Vehicles
As costs are radically reduced, the next goal in space transportation is to facilitate tremendously frequent space flight. This demand for transportation will grow with the need for more massive launches for building Solar Power Satellites, which weigh tens of thousands of tonnes; and also for general pubic's space travel.

To fulfill these demand, new transportation vehicles will inevitably be fundamentally different in design and operation from the current expendable rockets. The goal is to develop a reusable system that will allow flights that are as easy and commonplace as getting on an airplane.

Starting with figuring out these future demand, and taking into account the requirements for future transportation technologies, we built and fly an experimental vehicle. Many lessons were learned through design, construction and operation of the test vehicle. Though so far it has succeeded only in making some ascents and descents, we have experienced by the differences in the process in comparison to expendable rockets.

We would like to make further progress - to fly our experimental vehicle out of the atmosphere and to return safely. We wish to continue our work on reusable technologies, and to share better understanding about the benefit of reusable vehicles and the world of more and more frequent space flight.

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Research Division of Space Systems and Astronautics/ISAS Reusable Rocket Vehicle Testing Team Yoshifumi Inatani