An Overview of NASA-Japan Relations. from Pencil Rockets to the. International Space Station

A bird’s eye view of Japan’s space history since World War II reveals the grad­ual and difficult emergence of the country as a major space power that, with US assistance—but also to bypass US restrictions on the transfer of sensitive tech­nology—fruitfully channeled its quest for independence into a robust national program that enabled it to collaborate successfully with its erstwhile mentor and other partners.1 The United States, through NASA and private industrial corporations, supported Japan’s fledgling program early on, but deep internal divisions in the country made it difficult to build a durable arrangement. What little cooperation existed between Japan and NASA during the early 1960s was limited to small space science experiments using sounding rockets and data col­lection from ground stations. A 1969 agreement to provide launcher technology to Japan, strongly promoted by the State Department, was a major stimulus to the ongoing rationalization of a national space program, though this came too late for Japan to participate actively in the post-Apollo program. In fact NASA’s relations with Japan began to achieve significance only during the late 1970s and grew extensively in the later years to include a variety of cooperative space projects that benefited both countries, including human space flight and partici­pation in the International Space Station.2

This contribution traces the broad outlines of these developments with partic­ular emphasis on three of the most significant phases of US-Japanese collaboration in space: (1) the frustrations of the 1960s caused by internal rivalries and a strongly nationalist agenda in some sectors of the Japanese space science community that hampered international collaboration and that eventually crippled Japan’s ability to participate meaningfully in the post-Apollo program; (2) the transformations precipitated by the 1969 agreement to provide Japan with Thor-Delta technology that not only provided the country with much of the hardware needed to reach the geostationary orbit but also, by restricting the scope of technology transfer, accelerated the country’s independence and self-confidence in launcher develop­ment as the 1970s wore on (treated separately in the next chapter); and, finally (3) the contribution of Japan to the International Space Station in the 1980s.