The Planetary Society of Japan : Column

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YM COLUMN ARCHIVE

September 1, 2009

Change of Government

August 30, 2009 was the day the coalition government of Liberal Democratic and Komeito (Clean) parties collapsed. New cabinet headed by Mr. Yukio Hatoyama is expected to start around middle of September by advocating two campaign pledges of eliminating waste of tax money and banishing bureaucratism. How Democratic Party themselves analyzes the reason of the landslide victory of this time may directly affect the future course of their political activities, and at the same time the days of testing qualification of the new Diet members will start as well.

This country is now universally burdened with the tasks of finding way out of various problems pressed from the people’s requests in their daily lives. The dark clouds having hung over this country are becoming even thicker year-by-year, under such circumstances I strongly wish for freshman members of Diet to brace themselves up with the spirits of challenging to build the new nation of new era with outlook for bright future. The reason I say this is because the following words of an alpinist whom I respect are always embedded in my mind.

"The reason a nation grows strong and prosperous is because her sons love adventure. The reason a nation declines and falls is merely because her sons lost joys of challenging risks." (Henry Hoek) (Note: Translated by TPS/J)

Bad news is going on with regard to space. Augustine Report is overwhelmed with despair, “We just can’t talk of future to explore into space under the current budget allocated by Obama administration”, which was followed by another bad news of running out of fuels of US lunar explorer LCROSS; even more unfortunately, forest fires are threatening neighboring area of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, home center of planetary exploration. Launch failure of satellite by Korea and communication loss with satellite of Indian Chandrayaan that almost simultaneously took place remind us indeed of the saying, “Misfortunes never come singly”.

What is noteworthy among those misfortunes is that European Space Agency (ESA) appears to be ready for manned space flight of their own by fully using Russian Soyuz. I presume that they have virtually come to the final decision to annually send a few Europeans to space by using Soyuz. ESA is now functioning as an executive organ under the control of unified EU; however, each European country composing EU has a long time tradition to pay respect to specialists’ opinions in the fields of science and technology. There are many persons of wisdom in EU composed of seventeen countries. Member countries as many as seventeen may sometimes slow its mobility, but on the other hand EU is advantageous in gathering information on global trend. We may have a prospective expectation that there exists a group of people in Europe who have sensed a sort of backdown in US manned flight plan.

Discussion on manned flight in Japan has been often times denied by just a simple word of “no money”, which was argued by bureaucrats. I suppose it is needless to say which ministry is most influential in this sort of argument; other ministries show a sign of resistance in acquiring budgets but never finally win over the negotiations. There are various ways to do manned flight. American way of manned flight that was realized amid the desperate struggle of space race with Soviet Russia in 1960’s was just “go, go, go, and never stop going” that could be said, positively speaking, “orthodox”, and negatively speaking, in a way of spending money like water to “go for broken”. What manner Japan should take for manned flight must be in a way of Japanese own by flexibly using head.

On this occasion, I would like to say that what initiates the manned flight project must never start from “approval from bureaucracy” but from a strong problem presentation raised by front-line scientists and engineers. Collaboration with Europe might be one of choices. Another alternative is to start from converting unmanned H-II Transfer Vehicle scheduled in September to the flight manually operated by crew. What’s important is to find the most economically efficient way, otherwise it would never be possible to realize the manned flight dream by breaking through the barriers of some space circles suspicious of budget reduction only of their concern and of blindly restricted to stereotype concept of “too much money needed for manned flight” by Finance Ministry. Whatever informal discussion it may be, it is vitally important to present powerfully persuasive idea in a concrete way. Commencing discussion only after the approval of budget is the most miserable way contagious to mentality of “the government will foot the bill”. My personal opinion is that now is the time, once again, to go back to early 20th century, in reconsidering how to cope with space problems, when our predecessors in their poverties seriously thought about how to tackle with space development.

On the other hand, top-down access is none the less important for realization of manned flight; in this respect I would like to see how seriously the new government will face space problem of Japan to open up “discussion in a concrete way” which has been shelved up simply because of “no money” with open and broad policy without bothered by precedent. A mountain of issues such as waste of tax money, bureaucratism, pension, elderly care and correction of disparities is all waiting for their solution; all those difficult problems of this country bogged down in deadlock might be possibly cleared by the-dream-come-true of manned flight. Let us keep our keen eyes to see how the new government is going to meet a key test for a coming few months.

I welcome your opinions on this column to the following E-mail address.
matogawa@planetary.or.jp

(Translated by The Planetary Society of Japan)