What is this man doing?

News from the Strategic Headquarters for Space Policy (SHSP, 内閣官房宇宙開発戦略本部事務局) just in is that the Law to establish Japan’s new space structure, in which the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office will start to try to wrest control of Japan’s space programs from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), will now be delayed until mid-May.

According to SHSP director Mikio Aoki, the bill, which was submitted to Japan’s lower house, the House of Representatives on Feb. 14 was originally to have been debated and passed by the end of March.  It was then rescheduled for April 20. However, the DPJ administration is bogged down in other issues, most notably Prime Minister’ Noda’s discussions with opposition leaders about the DPJ’s plans to raise the consumption tax from April 2014. on which Noda has said he has staked his political life.

Noda is widely suspected of planning to dissolve the Lower House for a snap election if the Diet rejects the taxation bill. If this happens, then Japan faces another long and frustrating wait to enact the Basic Space Law of 2008.

The space bill, Cabinet Office Restructuring and Reform Law (内閣府設置法等の一部を改正する法律（閣議決定)),  is designed to fundamentally restructure the control of Japan’s space program and remove the restriction on the nation’s main space agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) from developing military space programs. It is designed to enable the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office to set up a 30-member Space Strategy Office (宇宙戦略室) that is headed by the Japanese Prime Minister while scrapping the Space Activities Commission, which currently controls JAXA. The Strategy Office  will assume control of all of Japan’s space planning, program and budget control, including that of JAXA through a new Strategic Space Committee set up in the Office, also chaired by the Prime Minister, said Takafumi Matsui, Emeritus Professor of Tokyo University and chairman of the advisory committee that proposed the law. For more on this, please see: Bill to Establish the 内閣府宇宙戦略室 (Space Strategy Office) sent to the Diet.

The Bill should have been drawn up and enacted within two years of the original Basic Law but was stalled by the election of the DPJ in 2009 and the opposition of MEXT, with the SHSP only managing to find a workable compromise this February. For some details of this, please see How will the SHSP’s Next-Gen Space Plan Unfold? The architects of the Bill had tied it to the General Space Activities budget,  which should have been passed March 31; and if the delay stretches much beyond May, this could impact Japan’s space policy making for yet another year.