USERS SEM Deorbiting Pod

I was lucky enough recently to spend a day interviewing great people at METI, USEF, Pasco and NEC a little while back and managed to nail down many more details about what is happening with the ASNARO (Advanced Satellite with New system Architecture for Observation) project. For some Space News background on ASNARO, please see my original story. This time, specifically METI asked me to write about it for them, and gave tremendous help getting NEC and Pasco on board. It was just wonderful meeting people with ideas and strategies that are obviously well thought out.

Let’s get the disclaimer out of the way first.

From where we are standing, from the point of view of national security space, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if NEC succeeds in its strategy to turn the ASNARO/Nextar branded modular satellite platform into a commercial success in/for ASEAN countries. Of course it matters to NEC, because they are a private company and want to make more profit.

And of course it matters to me, because for the health of NEC and Japan’s military industrial base, it’s better that they sell or get more SE Asian nations to “buy” them through ODA and I wish them every luck.

But, at the end of the day, IF ASNARO/Sasuke/ Nextar never makes a successful commercial go of it, the Japanese government is still going to make sure the platform is built. And we predict that ASNARO will play its role in Japan’s emerging national space security infrastructure.

ASNARO is crucial to a number of players in a number of ways. After years of false starts and what may have been blind alleys — MDS-1 Tsubasa or OICETS Kirari spring to mind –

Nextar represents what NEC has been trying to build since the late 90s (1998 if my memory serves me right, see NEC unveils prototype bus, aims for Teledesic, this being the non-Space News version) and the era of Hiroaki Shimayama and Takenori Yanase. Nextar, which looks suspiciously like a reworked OICETS/ MDS bus to me, and it’s the keystone of their pan-Asian commercial turnkey systems strategy.

We’ll go into this in Part II.  In Part III, we’ll look at the military angle, but only when the official article is published in Defense News.

So what is ASNARO?

ASNARO is a USEF powerplay to develop a bus system that on one hand will give NEC a chance to compeat in the ASEAN market for EO sats, and whether or not that succeeds, gives Japan the option to build a constellation of spysatellites, all kicked of with a tiny down-payment of 6 billion yen.

Therefore ASNARO is important to METI to show that its decades-long investment in creating standardized satelite bus systems and plug and play and COTs parts at USEF is finally paying off. Those of you  who have read In Defense of Japan know that we more or less regard USEF as METI’s DARPA, or military space arm, although USEF wouldn’t be comfortable with this description. Afterall, the technologies they develop are for peaceful purposes only. Right?

(I still vividly remember the change in body language when discussing with USEF how accurate USERS’s SEM -see image above- could be made).

Leaving aside the dual-use nature of many USEF projects, ANSARO is a vital component in what METI had been calling its Space on Demand (SOD) program, which, while it doesn’t actually use military language, leves very little to the imagination. Submarine launch, air launch (and with Epsilon) mobile launch! Reprogrammable satellites…”flexible” ground systems (we’ll get to that one in Part III).

Incidentally, the other main submarine space launch vehicle I know of  is the R-29R Vysota “Stingray” SLBM rebranded Volna and its peaceful brotherhood for lobbing payloads into LEO instead of  3x 300 kiloton-yield warheads at…wherever.

Behind this, ASNARO is a platform technology that also enables NEC to supply ISAS with SPRINT-series satellites, and could become a key part of Japan’s ODA strategy to counter China’s building influence in ASEAN. Hitherto, APRSAF has been a bit of a highly amicable talking shop. More about that in Part II.

Anyway, here is the Space News article with some of the bear-bones details. More to follow in Parts II and III.

ASNARO Delayed but far from Doomed!