Vain HOPE? Japan's space agency has dropped plans to develop the HOPE space carrier.

Japan has decided to make major cuts in its space programme, in response to the country's plans for financial reform. A first victim is the space shuttle HOPE, the unmanned space carrier which was intended to function as a supply vehicle to the Japanese module of the International Space Station.

In the longer term, the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) has indicated that it plans to ensure that its technology development programmes are more immediately responsive to user needs. NASDA may also gradually withdraw from providing the support on which Japan's commercial space industry has grown.

Reductions in NASDA's long-term budget plans were approved last week by the Space Activities Commission, the highest decision-making body on space policy in Japan. This was due to the increasing gap between NASDA's long-term spending plan — agreed at a time when its overall budget was growing at up to 10 per cent a year — and current estimates of its likely annual budget increases over the next few years.

The total budget of the Science and Technology Agency (STA), which oversees NASDA, is likely to rise by 5 per cent next year, in line with the government's commitment to increase funding for science. But the budget increase requested for NASDA has been kept at a mere 1.5 per cent.

NASDA's overall budget has remained almost unchanged since 1994 and, following parliamentary approval of prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto's financial reform plans, is not expected to rise significantly for several years, according to Mitsugi Chiba, director of STA's space policy division.

Plans to reduce expenditure

In response, the Space Activities Commission has asked NASDA to plan the implementation of a ¥80 billion (US$680 million) spending cut in existing projects over the next few years. This amounts to a total of 14 per cent of expenditures for existing projects.

While the spending cuts have been provoked by the need for financial reform, there has been much discussion in recent years about reducing costs. The initial proposal to scrap, scale down or delay some projects — including the abandonment of HOPE — was presented to the commission by NASDA in early July. This has now been approved.

A recent proposal for developing a fully reusable launch vehicle by 2010 is said to have been an important factor in the decision to scrap the HOPE project. On a reduced scale, NASDA will, however, proceed with development of an experimental version, HOPE-X.

The SELENE moon probe mission, a joint undertaking between NASDA and the Institute of Space and Aeronautical Science, Japan's second space agency, is also facing severe cuts. The mission has already been rescheduled, and will now be considerably simplified.

Low-cost components

Also affected will be NASDA's fledgling satellite development programme. Both the Advanced Land Observation Satellite (ALOS), scheduled for launch in 2002, and the engineering test satellite ETS-VIII, a large satellite intended to test basic space technologies, will have to be built for 20 to 30 per cent less than the initial cost estimates.

NASDA hopes to reduce construction costs of ALOS by reusing components developed for the ADEOS-II remote sensing satellite, a successor to the ADEOS Earth observation platform lost earlier this year (see Nature 388, 105; 1997), and by the demise of an engineering design model for ETS-VIII.

Industrial contractors are expected to carry the burden of the cuts. But NASDA has announced that it will assist contractors to develop low-cost satellite components, which should lead to reduced construction costs and projects are said to be underway to develop cost-efficient technologies for satellite components as well as for the Japanese module of the International Space Station.

Eventually, however, NASDA wants companies to develop competitively priced technologies without government support. This appears to be a shift from the space agency's previous policy, under which it had seen a vital part of its mission as being to nurture an internationally competitive space industry.

This reluctance to pursue industrial policy objectives may put NASDA in conflict with the Ministry for International Trade and Industry (MITI) and the Ministry for Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), which want government support for the development of satellite-based telecommunications.

Last April, MPT announced its intention to develop a global multimedia mobile satellite communication system. MPT and NASDA are cooperating on a feasibility study to that end. But a similar effort by MITI to launch a programme of low-orbit satellite development was recently described by the Space Activities Commission as “not an appropriate objective of the Japanese space programme”.

Faced with the prospect of a declining national space budget, industrial contractors — some of which have announced large investments in novel satellite construction and testing facilities — are seeking new markets and ways of diversifying product lines.

Need for new markets

NEC, Mitsubishi Electric and Toshiba — the three large satellite manufacturers in Japan — hope that Asian markets will provide them with an entry point into the international commercial satellite business. Japanese contractors are also said to be keen to participate in the emerging national space programmes of neighbouring countries.

Together with the recent ADEOS failure, financial austerity also forces NASDA to shift its technology development strategy towards an increasing recognition of users’ needs. Previously, this strategy had been primarily motivated by a desire to reach internationally competitive levels of technological achievement, says Tsukasa Mito, director of the mission-planing division of NASDA's office of satellite systems. In future, he says, greater weight is to be given to the users of the products and services.

As an example, he cites recent consideration of switching the development strategy for environmental monitoring space vehicles from very large platform-type satellites to small low-cost satellites carrying only one or two sensors. This would allow greater flexibility, and the ability to distribute the risk of technological failure across several projects.

But there should also be important benefits to the users of the resulting data. “It is not very practicable to construct large, sophisticated satellites that carry outdated equipment, and deliver their results to clients only with several years delay,” says Mito.