The other day, I visited the JAXA Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) in Sagamihara City, Kanagawa Prefecture for the first time in a while. This is the place I frequently visited when I wrote my book "Teikoku" about the current state and prospects of Japan's space development. , It was the first visit in five and a half years since I went on a shooting tour.
Rather than forcing people into space
ISAS is the core of Japan's space development, established by the late Hideo Itokawa, who is said to be the father of Japan's space development. It's a facility.
In the laboratory, there is a facility called "Space Science Exploration Exchange Building" where you can learn about the achievements of ISAS such as the asteroid explorers "Hayabusa" and "Hayabusa 2" (this was not there before). Yes!), anyone can view it by following a simple procedure.
Also, in front of the exchange building, the actual Mu rocket developed by ISAS is displayed, and even if you are not a space fan, your imagination about space will expand.
In Japan, astronauts tend to be the center of attention when it comes to space development. is.
There are liquid fuel rockets (using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen) and solid fuel rockets (using gunpowder). America's Apollo and Japan's H-II are liquid-fuel rockets, while Mu and Epsilon are well-known solid-fuel rockets.
If it is liquid fuel, it is possible to manufacture a huge rocket, so it can be equipped with a manned rocket or a huge probe. Japan also launched an H-II rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center, but that scale is too small to carry people into space. As a result, all Japanese astronauts have gone to the International Space Station on manned rockets from the United States, Russia, and Europe.
Someday, a domestic manned rocket! "The voice is still strong." That is why we are paying high costs to send Japanese people into space, and we are paying 1 trillion yen, which is less than 10% of the initial investment cost of the International Space Station, or about 40 billion yen annually.
However, since the national budget invested in JAXA is about 180 billion yen, the situation that 20% of it goes to the International Space Station has been the subject of criticism for a long time.
Furthermore, it costs about 19 billion yen to launch one H-II rocket. However, on that scale, manning is impossible.
Moreover, at present, most of the technology for liquid fuel rockets is developed by the United States, but Japan is doing licensed production + a little independent development. It will require a budget of 100 times or more.
In other words, the reality is that the development of a domestic manned rocket is "impossible to talk about as a dream."
On the other hand, the solid fuel type is small in scale, and the launch cost of the Epsilon rocket currently in operation is about 3 billion yen, which is less than one-sixth of the H-II.
There may be people who think that space development will not advance because it is a small rocket that people cannot ride.
However, space exploration does not have to be manned. On the contrary, the results achieved by Hayabusa and others were all made possible by unmanned spacecraft.
Therefore, it would be more meaningful to launch many unmanned probes into space and achieve various results, rather than enlarging the rocket to be launched and forcibly carrying people into space.
Already in Europe and the United States, space is not seen as a "dream space" but as a frontier for supremacy and new business.