A Japanese rocket carrying several satellites failed to take off on Wednesday (October 12th) and has therefore received a self-destruct order, confirmed the Japanese space agency Jaxa, for which it is the first failure of a launch since 2003.
“The rocket cannot safely continue a flight, because of the danger it would represent if it crashed on the ground”a Jaxa official told Japanese broadcaster TBS. “So we took measures to avoid such an incident, and we sent a signal” to destroy the rocket, the official added, without providing details on the origin of the problem. It was the sixth launch of an Epsilon rocket, a solid-fuel model from Jaxa whose (unmanned) flights started in 2013.
Jaxa interrupted the live online broadcast of the Epsilon-6 launch from its Uchinoura space center in Kagoshima prefecture (southwest Japan) on Wednesday, without initially giving any explanation. The 26m-tall, over 95-tonne rocket is smaller than Japan’s previous liquid-fueled model, and was the successor to its previous solid-fueled ‘MV’ launcher, which was discontinued in 2006 due to high costs.
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