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To Buy or Not: NASA’s Take on Japanese Space Freighter

July 21st, 2008
Author Tariq Malik

» To Buy or Not: NASA’s Take on Japanese Space Freighter

NASA has no current plans to buy Japanese space freighters for cargo runs to the International Space Station (ISS) despite recent media reports contending the contrary, the U.S. agency said Monday.

A Sunday report attributed to the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri and later picked up by other media outlets suggested NASA was unofficially in talks to purchase flights of unmanned H-2 Transfer Vehicle (HTV) from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to haul future U.S. cargo to the space station.

But NASA said the reports were erroneous, with no talks - unofficial or otherwise - under way to buy such flights.

“NASA is committed to domestic cargo resupply to the space station and does not plan to procure cargo delivery services from Japan,” NASA officials said in a statement.

Japan's HTV cargo ship.
An artist’s interpretation of Japan’s HTV cargo ship arriving at the International Space Station. Credit: JAXA.

Japan’s HTV cargo ship, a 16.5-ton cylinder about 33 feet (10 meters) long, is slated to make its launch debut atop a Japanese H-2B rocket next year. It follows this year’s first flight of Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle, also unmanned, and would join Russia’s unmanned Progress cargo ships and the crewed NASA shuttles and Russian Soyuz vehicles already in the station’s flotilla of service craft.

NASA’s human spaceflight workhorse, a fleet of three U.S. space shuttles, is set to retire in 2010 after the construction is complete on the International Space Station. While NASA is facing a gap between shuttle fleet’s end and the first operational flights of its successor - the Orion crew capsule and its Ares I booster - the agency is banking on private firms like California-based SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, Corp., of Virginia, to provide unmanned cargo service to the space station in the future.

The agency also has a $700 million contract in hand to use Russian spacecraft for space station support.

While NASA has no current plans to buy Japanese spacecraft, it does already have agreements in place with JAXA and the European Space Agency to include U.S. cargo on its partner’s spacecraft as compensation for the shared costs of operating the $100 billion International Space Station, the U.S. agency said.