Posted on 02/01/2004 11:49:34 AM PST by KevinDavis
Spurred by China's success in its first-ever manned space flight, Japan plans a drastic review of its space policy and will consider launching manned space trips as well, a report said Thursday.
The government will "consider realising a manned space flight by a Japanese astronaut at an early time", the Yomiuri Shimbun daily said in its evening edition, without indicating a timeframe.
The government's science and technology council, chaired by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, is expected to agree to draw up a new policy by mid-2004, the mass-circulation daily said without citing sources.
Japan had decided to review its space policy primarily because China had succeeded in putting a man into space last October and US President George Bush announced this month a US return to the moon as early as 2015, it said.
But the daily added some government officials are cautious towards manned flight programmes as they would need to boost the space development budget, currently totalling a relatively paltry 300 billion yen (2.8 billion dollars) a year.
No immediate comment on the report was available from the science ministry.
In November Japan failed to put a pair of spy satellites into orbit, dashing hopes of using its domestically-developed H2-A rocket to become a player in the commercial satellite launch market.
This'll be fun.
Didn't Japan cut back previous plans for a manned program because of budget concerns?
The Frontier thesis was postulated by Alfred Thayer Mahan a noted US Naval Officer and historian. The Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark, The Oregon Trail, The Santa Fe trail, all of our Western expansion was driven by commerical exploitation of the resources of the west. Manifest Destiny was the belief that we would expand westward and bring settlers and industry to those parts of the country that were unexplored and unexploited.
Space is no different. Burt Rutan is going there. The inventor of the Paypal system used by E-Bay et al sold his company for $4 Billion and is now building a low cost rocket.
The entrepreneurs are the reason we are who we are as a civilization. Read about the Wright Brothers, William Boeing, Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford and other aviation pioneers and yoiu may reconsider your statement vis a vis state power and private enterprise.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.