Abstract
The story of Japan’s space programme may be traced to aeronautical research in the early twentieth century. In 1944, Germany sent Japan its rocket designs by U-boat. The father of the space programme was aeronautical engineer Hideo Itokawa, who established a research group in Tokyo University. This experimented with tiny rockets in the 1950s, eventually attracting government support to construct sounding rockets which became Japan’s contribution to the International Geophysical Year. In the 1960s, these rockets reached 700 km altitude. A launch base was built in Uchinoura. The next step was a satellite, for which a sounding rocket was upgraded sufficiently for a small satellite to reach orbit. On the fifth attempt, in 1970, success was achieved with the satellite Ohsumi and Japan became the fourth country to reach orbit. This achievement was controversial. Hideo Itokawa had a vision that Japan should develop an indigenous programme of small launchers orbiting scientific satellites. His independent-mindedness attracted criticism from the United States which preferred Japan to use American rockets, a warning of what was to become, at times, a fractious relationship. Itokawa was driven out of the space programme but lived to old age and is now venerated.
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Harvey, B. (2023). Origins – The Legacy of Hideo Itokawa. In: Japan In Space. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45573-5_1
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