[ExI] Japan Wants to Build Intercontinental Passenger Spaceships by the Early 2040s

[John Grigg]

"A booming space industry is making it easier than ever to get into orbit,
but Japan is betting that it could revolutionize terrestrial travel, too. The
country’s science ministry has unveiled a plan to develop intercontinental
passenger spaceships by the early 2040s.

The idea of using spaceships to travel from one point on the Earth’s
surface to another has been around since at least the 1960s, but the cost
and complexity of the idea have meant it’s been little more than a pipe
dream.

In principle, the approach isn’t that different from the one used by
intercontinental ballistic missiles. A rocket is used to blast the payload,
be it a nuclear weapon or a passenger spaceship, on a big looping
trajectory into space before re-entering the atmosphere on the other side
of the planet.

The approach could make it possible to travel between continents in under
an hour, and now Japan has outlined it
<https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210515/p2a/00m/0sc/013000c?mc_cid=67a7de0a4f&mc_eid=17e73a80fc>s
vision
<https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210515/p2a/00m/0sc/013000c?mc_cid=67a7de0a4f&mc_eid=17e73a80fc>
for how to make the idea a reality. In a roadmap unveiled at an expert
panel earlier this month, its science ministry put forward a two-phase plan
it predicts could support a 5 trillion yen ($46 billion) market for
spaceships departing from and arriving in Japan.

Local reports on the strategy are light on detail, but it seems to rely on
the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) achieving dramatic reductions
in the cost of launching vehicles into space.

The country’s next-generation H3 rocket
<https://global.jaxa.jp/projects/rockets/h3/>, which is due for a maiden
flight this year, costs roughly five billion yen, and the roadmap predicts
that tactics like reusing rocket parts
<https://singularityhub.com/2021/05/17/spacex-milestone-signals-reusable-rockets-are-becoming-mainstream/>
will allow them to halve that cost by 2030, and get it down to as low as 10
percent by the early 2040s.

They will then rely on private companies to develop transport vehicles that
can carry passengers. They envisage two different kinds of spaceships: a
spaceplane similar to the space shuttle that can land on a runway like a
normal aircraft, and one that lands vertically like SpaceX
<https://singularityhub.com/tag/spacex/>’s reusable rockets."
https://singularityhub.com/2021/05/30/japan-wants-to-build-intercontinental-passenger-spaceships-by-the-early-2040s/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20210531/67a887d0/attachment.htm>