SANTA FE, N.M. — The Japanese space agency JAXA has set a mid-February date for the return to flight of the H3 rocket, nearly a 12 months after the vehicle’s first launch failed.
JAXA announced Dec. 27 that the second launch of the H3 was scheduled for no sooner than Feb. 14 (Feb. 15 Japanese time) from the Tanegashima Space Center. The launch period for the mission, designated H3 Test Flight No. 2 or H3TF2, extends through the top of March.
The launch shall be the primary for the H3 since its unsuccessful inaugural flight March 7. On that launch the primary stage appeared to perform as expected however the engine within the second stage didn’t ignite, triggering the vehicle’s flight termination system.
Neither JAXA nor Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), the prime contractor for the H3, have disclosed many details concerning the reason behind the failure. Since the second stage engine is comparable to the one used on the prevailing H-2A, a launch of that vehicle carrying the XRISM X-ray astronomy satellite and SLIM lunar lander was delayed from May to September.
Iwao Igarashi, vice chairman and general manager of MHI, said on the World Satellite Business Week conference in September that the investigation into the H3 failure was accomplished in August but didn’t discuss what that investigation revealed.
“We defined the corrective actions and a few of them applied to the H-2A launch vehicle,” he said on the conference, which took place lower than every week after that vehicle launched XRISM and SLIM. “The following step is we’re working hard to organize for the return to flight” of the H3, which on the time he said was planned for late 2023.
A change for the second H3 launch shall be the payload. For the primary launch, JAXA flew the ALOS-3 Earth statement satellite, a spacecraft that cost about $200 million. The agency faced sharp criticism after the failure for putting a beneficial spacecraft on the rocket’s first flight.
The upcoming H3 launch will as an alternative carry a test payload, called the Vehicle Evaluation Payload-4. The mission may also carry two smallsat secondary payloads. One, CE-SAT-1E, is an Earth imaging spacecraft developed by Canon Electronics. The opposite, TIRSAT, is a cubesat built by Japan Space Systems with an infrared Earth statement instrument.