TSX:6503 19 June 2025 - 27 June 2026

Japan’s journey in space began in the 1950s and has grown from university research rockets to a major national endeavor. In 1955, Professor Hideo Itokawa’s team launched the first pencil rocket as a rudimentary experiment en.wikipedia.org. By the 1960s, Japan developed larger sounding rockets leading up to its first satellite launch. In February 1970, Japan successfully launched the Ohsumi satellite on a Lambda-4S rocket, making Japan the world’s fourth spacefaring nation to launch an indigenous satellite into orbit u-tokyo.ac.jp. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Japan built out its launch sites at Tanegashima and Uchinoura, and developed new rockets often with technology licensed or adapted from the U.S. nasaspaceflight.com. In the 1990s, Japan progressed to the H-II rocket – its first fully home-grown liquid-fuel launcher nasaspaceflight.com. The H-II’s early flights faced some costly failures, exposing the need for greater reliability and cost-efficiency nasaspaceflight.com. This led to the H-IIA rocket which became a workhorse with a 98% success rate over 50 launches nasaspaceflight.com. Notable scientific missions in this era included Kaguya, Hayabusa, and Akatsuki. Japan also sent its first astronauts into space: beginning with payload specialist Toyohiro Akiyama in 1990 and multiple JAXA astronauts on NASA Space Shuttles through the 1990s–2000s. In