Monday, October 18, 2010

Space News have just published a recent interview I had with Seiji Maehara, former State Minister for Space Development and now Foreign Minister.

It was pretty interesting in terms of confirming that Maehara is not a dove at all. But for me, what was interesting was what Maehara Daijin left out, namely:

a) There is no fixed deadline on when the Space Activities Act is going to be passed. The deadline came and went for this a few months ago. Commitments to standardize and have a legal basis for all sorts of issues have been locked since spring spring 2009. This is a critical point and I’ll be writing about this later.

b) Early Warning: EW is supposed to be a priority for Japan, and several sources have stated this repeatedly. However it also appears that the MOD is becoming increasingly alarmed by the size of China’s blue water fleet. The major priority seems to be more money for the navy. So it appears a more traditional wing and big bucks for contractors in the form of MSDF spending has won out (albeit temporarily) in the MOD.c) What is going to happen to the doubling of the space budget over the next ten years that was de facto promised by Takeo Kawamura, and is the financial backbone of Japan’s ten-year timetable for satellite launches? Again, more on this later.

More Spy Bird Cash for Melco

Separately, there was confirmation that some cash has been found to launch a “spare” Radar IGS to try to offset any more failures. Those of you who watch J-space will know that 2 of Melco’s radar birds, IGS 1A and 4B have both failed before their nominal 5-year on-orbit lifespan.

IGS 1A failed in March 2007, a nearly respectable 4 years into its 5-year mission, the cause of which was an “electrical failure.” IGS 4B, with an improved SAR with about 1-meter all-weather resolution, conked out this spring, half-way through it’s mission, also due to an undisclosed electrical failure. Officially the CSIC is investigating the cause to see if the electrical failures are related.

It should be noted that I have reliable sources stating that there were other problems with IGS 1A. It’s quite well known that it wasn’t working properly.

Of course, it’s pure speculation that these failures could also be related to the electrical failures that have visited other Melco satellites, namely Adeos-2 (Midori-2) in October 2003 possibly caused by short in the cable bundles supplying electricity from the solar panel to the bus.

The CSIC has officially denied that the “spare IGS” will be launched in FY2014 and that it will cost 30 billion yen about “half” the cost of a “standard” IGS.

Anyway, here is the rest in the Space News format:

Japan’s reconnaissance satellite program is designed to function as a fleet of two radar and two optical satellites enabling reasonably close coverage of East Asia in general and North Korea in particular. The first generation radar satellites are able to resolve images through cloud with a resolution of 1-3 meters, while the first generation optical satellites are designed to resolve objects of 1 meter.The latest failure means that the fleet will be without radar coverage until the launch of the next radar reconnaissance satellite in fiscal 2011.