Japanese rocket lifts off with international payload

A Japanese rocket carrying an Australian satellite lifted off from its pad on a remote island today, marking the first time the domestically developed H-2A has been launched with an international payload.

The black and orange rocket, which also carried a satellite designed to monitor the movement of whales, lifted off into blue skies from the Tanegashima Space Centre on a small, rocky isle off the coast of southern Japan.

Australia is the first country to entrust Japan with launching a satellite into space, and officials were hoping it would mark a major boost to Japan’s efforts to join the commercial satellite launching business.

Japan was not making any money this time, however.

It offered last year to put Australia’s satellite – the research pod, FedSat - into space as a gift for the centennial anniversary of Australia’s commonwealth government.

The 58-kilo FedSat has high-tech communication, space science, navigation and computing equipment and was intended to help bring broadband Internet services to remote parts of Australia. Data from its three-year mission was to be shared between the two nations.

The three Japanese satellites aboard included the Whale Ecology Observation Satellite, designed by a university to monitor the movements and behaviour of whales over the next one to two years, and another probe to observe global warming and environmental change.

The two-stage H-2A is the centrepiece of Japan’s space programme and the focus of its commercial satellite-launching hopes.

Today’s launch was the fourth for the H-2A, following launches in August 2001 and February and September of this year. Next year, it is scheduled to launch Japan’s first spy satellites into orbit.

Though the others were successful, the National Space Development Agency’s second H-2A mission in February was marred by the loss of a multi-million pound research probe.