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HTV-5 On Its Way To the ISS
nojayuk writes: There's another launcher delivering cargo to the ISS apart from US and Russian vehicles, and it's Japanese. The fifth Koutonori (White Stork) cargo vehicle was successfully launched today at from pad 2 of the Yoshinobu Launch Complex at Tanegashima south of Tokyo at 11:50:49 UTC, carrying over 5 tonnes of food, spare parts and scientific equipment to the ISS in a pressurised cabin and an external racking system. This is the fifth successful launch in a row for the Japanese H2B launcher. The Koutonoris have carried over 20 tonnes of cargo in total to the ISS, more than double the amount of SpaceX's six successful CRS resupply flights.
Of course they're working hard on their launch capabilities. How else are they going to get their giant mecha into space?
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Japan's vehicle has the highest payload of any of the current launch systems but it is also a hugely expensive launch system. The cost per launch is around 15 Billion yen, $121m USD. They are currently developing the H3 as the successor to the H2B launch system with the primary target of reducing the cost by half.
The Falcon 9 by comparison has a launch cost of $57 million.
The Falcon 9 has a lift capacity of 13,000kg to LEO vs 16,500 for the H2B.
So it depends what race you are looking at.
the USA is Portugal in the race to the New (Space) World.
Maybe you forgot that we landed a sensor and manipulator packed dune buggy on mars? Or that probe that just surveyed the Pluto system and is heading to the Kuiper belt? Or the Opportunity rover that's been active on Mars for over ten years and is still chugging along? Oh ... all of that on a severely reduced budget.
No, it's just that the USA does the hard stuff. We just don't do the space equivalent of cargo hauling.
Falcon 9 is 17 successful from 19 launches and only 1 of those was a catastrophic failure, the other was a T-2 abort. The H2B is only on it's 5th launch so we don't know if it is as reliable or not yet.
There's no indication the H2 is safer or more reliable than Falcon.
I'm a bit surprised by some posters talking like a success for the Japanese somehow hurts spacex or vice versa. It's good to have lots of redundancy.
As to costs, even if the Japanese launcher can match or beat spacex costs, spacex has one thing no one else even the Russians have. That's return cargo capability. For research purposes this is a big deal.