Pieces of the largest laboratory to launch towards the International Space Station (ISS) are coming together and Japan couldn’t be happier.
More than two-thirds of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Kibo laboratory awaits NASA shuttle rides to the space station early next year at the U.S. agency’s Cape Canaveral, Florida spaceport. Altogether, engineers are poring over two JAXA pressurized modules and a pair of robotic arms as they await next year’s delivery of external experiment platform to complete Kibo, also known as the station’s Japanese Experiment Module (JEM).
“JEM is the first Japanese human [spaceflight] facility,” Kichiro Imagawa, JAXA’s JEM development project manager, told SPACE.com in an interview. “I think it’s very important for Japan to develop them and launch them successfully.”
JAXA has spent about $3 billion developing Kibo, whose name means ‘Hope,’ Imagawa said. The laboratory’s total cost, however, is about twice that when including the module’s planned orbital operations and ground mission control center in the Space Station Operations Facility at Tsukuba Space Center, which sits just north of Tokyo in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, he added.
The first piece of JAXA’s laboratory was slated to launch towards the ISS in December of this year, though NASA pushed the flight to February 2007 following delays with its next shuttle mission, STS-117 aboard Atlantis.
“We at JAXA have been waiting for JEM’s launch for more than 10 years, so two more months of delay is not a big problem,” Imagawa said.
SPACE.com — Japan Prepares Space Station’s Largest Laboratory for Flight