JAXA

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  JAXA, Japan's national space agency, was born on the 1st of October 2003 from an unusual act of consolidation: three separate Japanese aerospace organizations were folded into one. The merger brought together researchers who had been mapping X-ray stars, engineers who had been building rockets, and the team that had put Japan's first experimental modules into orbit. What would a unified agency do that three separate ones could not? The answer would unfold over the following two decades in a series of missions that took Japan to asteroids, to Venus, to the Moon, and to Mercury - and planted Japan's astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

  The three organizations that merged were the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, the National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan, and the National Space Development Agency of Japan, known as NASDA. NASDA had been founded on the 1st of October 1969, exactly 34 years before the merger that absorbed it. Each of the three had carved out its own specialty, and the question of how to knit those specialties together would shape JAXA's identity for years.

• 2. Three Agencies, One Mission

  ›

  ISAS, the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, had built its reputation in the 1980s and 1990s largely through X-ray astronomy. It also achieved notable success with Very Long Baseline Interferometry through the HALCA mission, which launched in 1997 as the world's first spacecraft dedicated to space-based VLBI observations. ISAS set up a ground network around the world to support it, and the observation portion of the mission ran until 2003.

  NASDA, meanwhile, had grown into a rocket-builder and satellite-operator. Its old headquarters sat at what is now the Tanegashima Space Center, on Tanegashima Island, 115 kilometers south of Kyushu. NASDA was primarily active in communication satellite technology, and it trained the Japanese astronauts who flew with American Space Shuttles. Earth climate observation was another core focus.

  NAL, the National Aerospace Laboratory, concentrated on aviation research. Combining these three distinct research cultures under a single roof required a new administrative structure: JAXA was established as an Independent Administrative Institution, administered by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The Basic Space Law, passed in 2008, later shifted jurisdictional authority to the Strategic Headquarters for Space Development in the Cabinet, led by the Prime Minister. That same year, the Space Foundation gave JAXA the John L. "Jack" Swigert Jr. Award for Space Exploration.

• 3. Chasing Asteroids

  ›

  On the 9th of May 2003, just months before the agency merger was finalized, a spacecraft named Hayabusa lifted off atop an M-V rocket. Hayabusa is Japanese for peregrine falcon. Its target was asteroid 25143 Itokawa, a small near-Earth body.

  The spacecraft rendezvoused with Itokawa in September 2005. In November 2005, after some initial confusion about the incoming data, scientists confirmed that Hayabusa had actually landed on the asteroid's surface. What came next took years. Hayabusa returned to Earth with samples from Itokawa on the 13th of June 2010, making it the world's first spacecraft to return asteroid samples to Earth and the first to complete a round trip to a celestial body farther from Earth than the Moon.

  Hayabusa2 extended this achievement. Launched in 2014, it targeted asteroid 162173 Ryugu and went further than its predecessor: it deployed rovers directly onto the asteroid's surface. The samples from Ryugu arrived back on Earth in 2020. Together, the two Hayabusa missions placed Japan at the center of asteroid sample-return science, a field that had not existed before Hayabusa pioneered it.

• 4. From Launch Pads to Orbit

  ›

  Japan launched its first satellite, Ohsumi, in 1970 using an L-4S rocket developed by ISAS. The country's early launchers were small and solid-fueled. NASDA eventually moved in a different direction, developing larger liquid-fueled rockets, initially using licensed American designs before pushing toward domestic technology.

  The H-II, introduced in 1994, was the first liquid-fueled launch vehicle developed entirely in Japan. NASDA designed it with two explicit goals: full technological independence and a dramatic improvement in launch capability. To achieve both, engineers adopted a staged combustion cycle for the first stage engine, the LE-7. The configuration that followed, pairing a liquid hydrogen two-stage combustion cycle first stage with solid rocket boosters, became the backbone of Japan's launch vehicles for 30 years, from 1994 to 2024.

  In November 2003, JAXA's very first launch after its founding, designated H-IIA No. 6, failed. Every subsequent H-IIA mission succeeded. By June 2025, the rocket had completed 48 of its 49 total launches successfully. JAXA formally retired the H-IIA with Flight No. 50, launched on the 28th of June 2025.

  At the smaller end of the scale, a second attempt with the SS-520-5 rocket on the 2nd of February 2018 placed a four-kilogram CubeSat into Earth orbit. The SS-520-5 is the world's smallest orbital launcher. The current generation of JAXA rockets includes the H3, operating from Tanegashima Space Center, and the Epsilon S, operating from Uchinoura Space Center.

• 5. The Moon and the Inner Planets

  ›

  On the 14th of September 2007, JAXA launched the lunar orbiter Kaguya, also known as SELENE, aboard an H-2A rocket. The mission cost 55 billion yen including the launch vehicle, making it the largest lunar mission since Apollo. Kaguya entered lunar orbit on the 4th of October 2007, and after one year and eight months in orbit, it impacted the lunar surface on the 10th of June 2009 at 18:25 UTC.

  Sixteen years later, Japan reached the Moon's surface. SLIM, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, launched in 2023 and soft-landed on the 19th of January 2024 at 15:20 UTC, making Japan the fifth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon. The primary goal was precision: SLIM aimed to touch down within 100 meters of its target, a feat no previous spacecraft had achieved. It landed 55 meters from the target site, which JAXA declared the world's first successful "pinpoint landing."

  The landing came with a complication. SLIM's solar panels ended up oriented westward, facing away from the Sun at the start of lunar day. The lander drained its battery that first day and shut down. On the 29th of January, it resumed operations after a shift in lighting conditions allowed sunlight to reach the solar cells. It then survived lunar night, when surface temperatures fall to -120 degrees Celsius, even though its electronics were not designed to withstand those conditions. That feat had previously been achieved only by some landers in the Surveyor Program.

  In planetary exploration, the Venus orbiter Akatsuki had a harder road. Launched on the 20th of May 2010, it failed to complete its Venus orbit insertion on the 7th of December 2010. After five years of maneuvering, Akatsuki finally entered Venus orbit on the 7th of December 2015, becoming the first Japanese spacecraft to orbit another planet. One of its main goals is to explain Venus's super-rotation, a phenomenon in which cloud-top winds in the troposphere circulate faster than Venus itself rotates. No full explanation for this phenomenon has yet been found.

• 6. Station Life and Deep Space Infrastructure

  ›

  Kibō, the Japanese Experiment Module aboard the International Space Station, is the station's largest single module. Three Space Shuttle missions, STS-123, STS-124, and STS-127, delivered its parts to the ISS in 2008-2009. Japan has resupplied the station using HTV cargo spacecraft since 2009, later developing the HTV-X.

  Since 1992, eleven members of the JAXA Astronaut Corps have flown in space aboard the Space Shuttle, Soyuz, and Dragon 2 spacecraft. The first Japanese citizen in space was Toyohiro Akiyama, a journalist sponsored by TBS, who flew on the Soviet Soyuz TM-11 in December 1990 and spent more than seven days aboard the Mir space station. The Soviets described it as their first commercial spaceflight, which earned them $14 million. JAXA's first astronaut, Mamoru Mohri, flew as Payload Specialist on STS-47 in September 1992, a mission partially funded by Japan.

  For communications with deep-space spacecraft, JAXA operates two stations near Saku in Nagano Prefecture. The older Usuda Deep Space Center, opened in 1984, houses a 64-meter antenna built by Mitsubishi Electric. The newer Misasa Deep Space Station, completed in 2021 at a cost of over ten billion yen, carries a 54-meter dish also built by Mitsubishi Electric. MDSS's larger aperture area is two and a half times greater than equivalent antennas in the NASA and ESA networks. MDSS also added the first direct north-south baseline in the X/Ka VLBI network, Japan to Australia, creating four new baselines that improve measurement precision.

  Looking ahead to December 2026, the Martian Moons eXploration spacecraft is scheduled to launch on a mission to collect samples from Phobos and return them to Earth, while also conducting remote sensing of Deimos.