Free Republic

Dec. 18 (UPI) -- The Japanese company Space One failed for a second time Wednesday to launch its Kairos rocket when it went out of control about two minutes into the flight. The rocket's first-stage nozzle malfunctioned about 80 seconds into the flight at 11:00 a.m. Wednesday local time from Space Port Kii in Kushimoto, Wakayama Prefecture, and automatically self-destructed during the launch that had already been postponed twice by weather conditions. Space One is attempting to be the first private company in Japan to put satellites into orbit and the company's president, Masakzu Toyoda, made a press conference apology...

Japan’s Space One Kairos rocket exploded Wednesday during its first-ever launch. Kairos was supposed to be the first rocket launched by a Japanese company to deliver its payload, a fallback government intelligence satellite, into Earth’s orbit, according to Reuters. Just seconds after lifting off at 11:01 am local-time, the rocket burst alive in a fiery explosion, fragments spewing into the launch site’s surrounding mountains of the Kii peninsula in western Japan, as seen from multiple angles shared across social media. In some of the videos you can clearly hear alarm bells ringing as everything seems to go wrong. The 18-meter...