Japan will cooperate with France’s national space agency in flight tests to develop an unmanned shuttle, a Japanese agency said Tuesday.
The Japanese government’s National Space Development Agency (NASDA) has exchanged provisional documents on joining forces with the French national space research centre CNES, NASDA said in a statement.
They will cooperate in flight tests for the development of Japan’s HOPE-X shuttle, using a smaller-scale experimental model, it said.
CNES will provide ground facilities, a balloon and other equipment for the test to be held in Sweden around 2002 while NASDA will give experiment data to the French partner.
Japan’s space project has stalled especially since last November when space authorities had to explode a 24-billion-yen (229-million-dollar) H-2 rocket and satellite mid-air when the rocket’s main engine failed.
The explosion was the second successive failure in the costly H-2 rocket project after a 36-million-dollar satellite was lost in space despite a successful separation from the rocket in February 1998.
The spectacular failure last year forced NASDA to postpone the launch of a next-generation H-2-A rocket from this month to between April 2000 and March 2001.
NASDA hopes to conduct the final experiment on HOPE-X in 2004 with an H-2-A rocket.
