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.

Comments

Re:So, Japan is winning the new space race...

[Harlequin80]

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 room for several players to be successful

[caseih]

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.