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Japan's first space shuttle crash lands in Sweden

Posted on: Wednesday, 2 July 2003, 06:00 CDT

TOKYO (AP) -- Japan's delta-wing space shuttle flawlessly approached the speed of sound while cruising over Sweden but tumbled into a field moments later for a crash landing that cast doubt on future trials of the experimental craft, a space official said Wednesday.

The five-minute flight was the latest set back for the country's ambitious, but beleaguered and cash-strapped space program.

Its Mars-bound probe, which sling-shotted past Earth last month on its way to the red planet, is years behind schedule, low on fuel and might not even make it.

The space shuttle, an unmanned swallow-tailed craft only 3.8-meters (12.5-feet) long, took flight Tuesday -- lifted by a stratospheric balloon to the frigid height of 21 kilometers (13 miles) above an international test site in northern Sweden.

The shuttle was then released and hit speeds up to mach 0.8 during its 5-minute plunge. Scientists at Japan's National Space Development Agency monitored the flight for data on high speed acceleration and aerodynamics.

But as the shuttle barreled toward earth, two of the craft's three parachutes failed to open properly and the shuttle crashed into a field, breaking its left wing and nose cone.

``From a scientific perspective, it was a success because we collected the data we were looking for,'' NASDA spokesman Hiroaki Sato said. ``But because of the landing, we are unsure if we can continue the test flights.''

Two more test flights had been planned for before next Friday, one at the speed of sound, or mach 1; the other at the supersonic speed of mach 1.2.

Japan's space shuttle is not expected to be a competitor to NASA's craft. The U.S. program had been flying for more than two decades before it was suspended earlier this year when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry killing its seven crew.

Besides being much smaller and unmanned, the Japanese system is the prototype for a program -- the Hope-X project -- recently put on ice because of budget cuts.

Hope-X, started in the 1980s to develop a reusable unmanned space shuttle, was originally slated for launch in 2004. But lack of funds pushed it four years behind schedule before it was postponed.

NASDA has not said whether the Hope-X might be resurrected, but the agency maintains that the purpose of Tuesday's test flight was to gather data for future projects.

Japan has bugeted 2.8 billion yen (US$22.4 million) for two rounds of testing on the space shuttle, the current round in Sweden and an earlier one on Christmas Island in the Pacific Ocean -- that was largely successful.

Though Japan has sent an unmanned probe into lunar orbit and recently unveiled plans for a joint European mission that would be the first landing a probe on Mercury, it is struggling to compete in the commercial satellite launching market and has suffered a checkered record of technical successes and failures.

A February launch of Japan's H-2A rocket, the main focus of its space program, ended in failure with one of the probes lost in space. But the project got a boost a month later, when Japan successfully launched its first spy satellites.

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