Japan Controls Rocket Launch With Just 8 People and 2 Laptops 94
SpaceGhost writes "Sky News reports that the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) has launched an orbital telescope on a new generation rocket from the Uchinoura Space Centre in Kagoshima, in southwestern Japan. The Epsilon rocket uses an onboard AI for autonomous launch checks by the rocket itself (launch video). A product of renewed focus on reducing costs, the new vehicle required two laptops and a launch team of eight, compared to the 150 people needed to launch the previous platform, the M-5. Because of the reduced launch team and ease of construction, production and launch costs of the Epsilon are roughly half that of the M-5. The payload, a SPRINT-A telescope, is designed for planetary observation."
Decades late to the party... (Score:2, Interesting)
The USN boomer force was launching sixteen missiles with just twenty odd people as far back as 1960. (Yes, there were other people on the boat, but they were no more part of the launch crew than the crane operators at Uchinoura.) Today, it's twenty four missiles with the same crew.
Small solid rocket (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's a solid rocket booster stack (Score:5, Interesting)
The Epsilon rocket is three stages of solid rocket booster, like an ICBM. So there's no fueling on the pad, no plumbing, no cryogenics, and no turbopumps. The launch team has a lot less to do than with liquid-fueled rockets.
They're also proudly proclaiming how quickly they can prepare the rocket for launch. I don't think that these features are coincidental, and I don't think that cost savings are the only driver behind developing this thing. North Korea's leadership is a bit unstable at times, it may have nuclear weapons, and Japan has had North Korean rockets fly over its territory before. It's a serious potential threat to them.
Since they lost in WWII, Japan has been very pacifist, but in recent years it has begun to expand its military activities a bit, taking part in a UN peace keeping mission for instance. Outright developing an ICBM would probably go a bit too far at this point, but making a civilian rocket that can be launched at short notice with a small crew and has the range to hit North Korea could just be an acceptable compromise between mitigating the NK threat and not rocking the domestic political boat too much with overly aggressive military moves.