After a decade in development, Japan's H3 rocket is ready for its debut

Japan has a long history of launching orbital rockets, dating back about half a century. During much of this time, its launch industry has focused largely on orbiting national payloads, such as communications, global positioning, and Earth-observation satellites for sovereign purposes.

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However, with the H2-A rocket introduced in 2001, the country's launch industry sought to tap into the commercial launch market and send satellites into space for other countries and private companies. With this medium-lift rocket, which is about on par in lift capacity with SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, Japan had some commercial successes, including the notable launch of the Emirates Mars Mission in 2020.

But the H2-A rocket, which is manufactured by the Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has never really broken through. One reason is cost. At a launch price of approximately $90 million, the H2A rocket is about 50 percent more expensive than SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. As a result, Japan's H2A booster only launches a handful of times per year, primarily serving the Japanese government.

A lower price

This problem was already clear nearly a decade ago, so the Japanese space agency, JAXA, greenlit the development of the next-generation H3 rocket. As it developed the new vehicle, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries focused on cost. The goal was to sell the H3 at $51 million per launch in its base configuration. With a lower price, Japan envisioned doubling its launch cadence from about four to eight missions a year.

"I will stick to that price," Ko Ogasawara, the vice president of Mitsubishi's space system division, told Ars in 2018. "And that is a requirement from our government for the development of H3. So if we cannot do that, if we cannot attain that, our development program is completely stopped."

At the time, Japan aimed to launch the new rocket no later than March 2021. However, there were subsequent problems during the testing of the rocket's LE-9 main engine, which burns liquid oxygen and hydrogen. This has delayed the rocket's debut by about two years. But now, finally, that moment is at hand.

JAXA says, weather permitting, the H3 rocket's first flight will take place at 1:37 UTC on Friday, February 17, from Tanegashima, Japan. (This is 10:37 am local time in Japan and 8:37 pm ET Thursday in the United States.) The rocket will carry the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-3 payload into a Sun-synchronous orbit for JAXA.

Too late?

This is all well and good, but so far, relatively few commercial customers have signed on to the new Japanese rocket aside from satellite operator Inmarsat. This is partly due to delays in development and uncertainty over when the H3 rocket would actually take flight.

But another problem is that there are no clear advantages for this rocket over the Falcon 9, which has a very high reliability rating, with 170 consecutive successful launches since 2016. Moreover, it is not clear what price Mitsubishi is really selling the H3 rocket for, nor whether it can yet match the schedule reliability of the Falcon 9, which launches once a week or more.

Further Reading

There is yet another, more fundamental issue. When Japanese engineers first began designing the H3 rocket in 2013, they were not concerned about reusability. SpaceX would not land the Falcon 9 rocket for two more years and would not re-launch a first stage until 2017. However, as the development of the H3 has dragged out into the 2020s, it has become clear that rockets without some form of reusability strategy will face significant challenges as they compete for commercial launch contracts in the coming years.

This is not to say the H3 rocket will be obsolete as it rolls to the launch site this week. However, so much has changed in the world of launch over the last decade that it probably will be one of the world's last major development projects for a fully expendable launch vehicle.