Momo-3 is Japan's first private rocket to reach space

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/05/04/business/tech/momo-3-becomes-first-privately-developed-japanese-rocket-reach-outer-space/#.XM-C3BYpDYU

by aerophilic • 7 years ago

138 31 7 years ago

japantimes.co.jp

eatonphil• 7 years ago

The article's title is more clear; this is about a space company.

JMTQp8lwXL• 7 years ago

Perhaps biased, but my initial thought when I see the word "launch" (without context, such as this title) is a software product launch of some kind.

deepnotderp• 7 years ago

Note that this was not an orbital flight but rather a sounding rocket.

jcims• 7 years ago

Japan has had sounding rockets for ~50 years. So this was the first privately funded rocket to reach space or something?

grenoire• 7 years ago

Not sure if the title was changed, but yep. Sounds like it.

faitswulff• 7 years ago

Can anyone shed light on whatever is going on with the audio in the video? It sounds vaguely like counting if the counting were done by some sort of creepy bunny cartoon.

Arnavion• 7 years ago

It's Hatsune Miku, a synthesized computer voice.

https://blog.piapro.net/2019/04/z1904231-1.html

kache_• 7 years ago

Never change, japan

lovemenot• 7 years ago

Yes, counting down and then counting up again

SiempreViernes2• 7 years ago

Though there's some weird reverb or similar going on too I think, not simply the odd choice of a synthesized speaker for the countdown.

eastWestMath• 7 years ago

Maybe you should specify “aerospace”...

ecpottinger• 7 years ago

Drats, I was hoping the anime "Rocket Girls" would move to real life.

jpatokal• 7 years ago

Since the name of founder Takafumi Horie may not ring many bells outside a Japanese audience, let's just say he's a colorful character:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takafumi_Horie

ihccobirotih• 7 years ago

  The veracity of the suspicions aside, many smelled conspiracy given the timing of the action. It was seen as a political move by defenders of the status quo to punish Horie for daring to challenge them, and to discredit him and the business practices he had come to represent, which Horie's opponents considered distasteful and "un-Japanese".

I mean, considering we have been hearing a lot of stories about karoshi & the pervasive seniority culture lately, I think I am siding on his side a lot more, given that even people feels like the yakuza did a much better job at welfare sometimes.

mkl• 7 years ago

Indenting with spaces turns on code formatting. Please don't format text as code; it's unreadable on mobile.

Here's the quote:

The veracity of the suspicions aside, many smelled conspiracy given the timing of the action. It was seen as a political move by defenders of the status quo to punish Horie for daring to challenge them, and to discredit him and the business practices he had come to represent, which Horie's opponents considered distasteful and "un-Japanese".

SiempreViernes2• 7 years ago

So do you assert that both the district court and the supreme court were part of a conspiracy to discredit an entrepreneur? Or merely that the prosecutor got an accurate tip-off from some hostile party?

Causality1• 7 years ago

"Go straight up until you leave the atmosphere and then fall down" is a radically different proposition than reaching orbit. You could lift an unprotected human being to space with a 700kg rocket. Getting him to orbit would require a 9,000kg rocket.

walrus012• 7 years ago

Yes, exactly, amateurs have gone well above 100km (62.5 miles).

https://rocketry.wordpress.com/2014/08/18/amateur-rocket-tea...

cyberfart• 7 years ago

To be clear, only one amateur rocketry team (the one in the link) ever made it to space.

tqkxzugoaupvwqr• 7 years ago

Does the rocket drift away from the launchpad right after launch and for the first couple of seconds, or is it an optical illusion? It appeared to me as if the rocket was imbalanced until it gained enough speed.

paparush• 7 years ago

I also thought it had a lot of lateral movement.

walrus012• 7 years ago

Getting to space for 8 minutes in a parabolic trajectory is not hard, it's the 7800-8200m/s delta v thrusting horizontally to achieve a real orbit that's difficult. I've seen amateurs launching garage built rockets from the Nevada desert hit 80km...

needle02• 7 years ago

While this is awesome, I wonder why we hear a lot about businessmen who score big then funneling their wealth into moonshot projects about space exploration (Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Takafumi Horie, etc), but hardly ever on medical science and life extension. To me that seems like a much more urgent and personally relevant issue - I mean, without advancing the state of the art on those fields, even those rich & powerful men are all going to be dead in a mere 120 years. Why don't they seem to be doing much to address that when they're in the rare position to be able to do so?

*Edit: Richard Branson of Virgin Group, not Charles Bronson.

mc32• 7 years ago

Do you mean Richard Branson rather than the actor known as Charles Bronson?

That said, lots of people are benefactors of health and medicine. Maybe they don’t get the same notoriety, but maybe they weren’t looking for it either.

needle02• 7 years ago

Ack, you're right, Charles Bronson.

dtwest• 7 years ago

Both the wealthy and society as a whole spend way more on medical science than space. It's fairly common in the US for every wing of a hospital or every building in a medical school to be named after some rich businessman who is doing just that.

michaelmior• 7 years ago

Bill and Melinda Gates being notable exceptions of course.

Momo-3 is Japan's first private rocket to reach space

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