(Tokyo) Japan’s next-generation space launcher H3, which was scheduled for its maiden flight on Friday, failed to take off due to an apparent failure of its boosters (boosters) still unexplained, said the Japanese space agency Jaxa.
Takeoff was scheduled for Friday morning from the Tanegashima space center (southwest of Japan), but the rocket ultimately remained grounded after the countdown.
“It looks like we weren’t able to turn on the two boosters solids after successfully igniting the main liquid engines,” a Jaxa spokesman told AFP.
“We have abandoned the launch for today and are investigating the cause” of this failure, he added.
The imposing H3 model, successor to the H2-A rockets, is supposed to allow Japan to ensure more frequent, safer and less expensive commercial space launches to be able to compete in particular with the Falcon 9 launcher from the American company SpaceX. .
The H3’s maiden flight was originally scheduled for Japan’s 2020-21 fiscal year (April 2020 to end of March 2021) but was postponed due to technical difficulties.
The Jaxa is renowned for the high reliability of its flights, but it already experienced a failure last October with another of its launchers in a smaller range, Epsilon, which had to be destroyed shortly after take-off due to of a trajectory problem. It was then the first failure for a Japanese rocket since 2003.