The first flight of the Kairos rocket lasted only a handful of seconds. After taking off from its launch pad in Wakayama, Japan, the launcher exploded. A failure for the Japanese company Space One.
The big day for Space One will wait. The Japanese company hoped to launch its first rocket, Kairos (acronym for Kii-based Advanced & Instant Rocket System), from its launch site in Wakayama, a prefecture located in the southwest of the Japanese archipelago. Alas, things went badly wrong for Kairos very quickly.
In a video replayed on March 13, 2024 by BNO News, the launcher can be seen rising several tens of meters, changing inclination slightly and then exploding immediately afterwards. The entire sequence before the destruction of Kairos lasts a mere six seconds. The rest is just a large plume of smoke and the beginnings of a fire on the ground.
A first step validated, according to Space One
In a press release in Japanese published on March 13, Space One apologized and said it was launching an investigation into the causes of this failure. The space startup “ will resume launches and continue to provide launch services using small rockets. » However, she considers having validated the first stage of the flight.
According to Space One, this first step consisted of ensuring the rocket’s takeoff from its launch pad, at the end of the Kii peninsula. In total, the company has divided its efforts into six stages. The following cover the successive separations of the different stages that make up Kairos, then the release of the payload into space.
Kairos is a rocket made up of four stages and reaching a height of 18 meters. It is designed to transport loads of a rather modest size, of a few hundred kilograms, and place them in the immediate vicinity of the Earth – in low Earth orbit, that is to say at an altitude of a few hundred kilometers.
Space One is a young company. Founded in 2018, it had never launched anything before — the satellite it was supposed to deploy was inevitably lost in the disaster. Behind Space One, we find firms like Canon, IHI (engineering), Shimizu (public works) and the Development Bank of Japan.
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