A rocket developed by a maverick Japanese entrepreneur and convicted fraudster exploded shortly after lift-off on 30 June, in a major blow to his bid to send Japan’s first privately backed rocket into space.
Interstellar Technologies, founded by popular internet service provider Livedoor’s creator Takafumi Horie, launched the unmanned rocket, MOMO-2, at around 5:30 am (local time) from a test site in Taiki, southern Hokkaido.
But television footage showed the 10-metre (33-foot) rocket crashing back down to the launch pad seconds after liftoff and bursting into flames.
The launch was supposed to send the rocket carrying observational equipment to an altitude of over 100 kilometres (62 miles) lifted only slightly from its launch pad before dropping to the ground, disappearing in a fireball. The failure follows a previous setback in July last year, when engineers lost contact with the trajectile about a minute after it launched.
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Interstellar Technologies president Takahiro Inagawa said he believes the rocket suffered a glitch in its main engine. Interstellar Technologies said it would continue its development programme after analysing the latest failure.The incident caused no injuries.
Footage on NHK public television showed a charred rocket lying on the ground.
The founder of Interstellar Technologies, Takafumi Horie is one of the most prominent entrepreneurs in Japan largely known for building Livedoor – a Yahoo style portal that he founded in 1995. Horie who spent two years in jail for a securities fraud (for pumping the market capitalisation of his start-up – Livedoor) founded Interstellar Technologies in 2013. He ran for the parliament in 2005 and published a string of books such as ‘How to make a 10 billion Yen’. Horie is popularly known as ‘Horiemon’ in Japan due to his resemblance to Doraemon, the chubby robot cat – in a popular Japanese anime. However, privately backed efforts to explore space from Japan have so far failed to compete with the government-run Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.