At the same time, we continue to witness China’s client state, North Korea, acting with increasing belligerence and apparent lack of care. One is reminded of a small-minded bully trying to cause trouble in the schoolyard, and then running back under the protection of some larger kid as soon as things get hot.

The peace requirements of the Japanese constitution have long been a matter of debate and contention inside Japan, and the legal modifications mentioned in today’s issue by author Paul Kallender-Umezu appear to have opened the door to a conversion of defensive hardware, software, and budget into the offensive category.

As any modern military expert will tell you, space represents the high ground in coming global conflict. As you are about to discover, the Japanese have used a large number of peaceful programs, in concert, to allow a flip-the-switch space offensive capability beyond almost anyone’s current estimation.

I have no doubt that all of our members will be surprised and awakened to a new military space power they previously had underestimated. I think this issue of the SNS Asia Letter lives up to a well-earned reputation for clearly describing a major strategic issue that other media have yet to touch. If you want to understand Japan’s response to China’s military buildup, this letter provides an excellent place to start. And given the positioning of these second- and third-largest global economies, and their recent and growing skirmishes, this understanding should be required of all people doing business in Asia.

Americans didn’t take much notice when North Korea fired missiles over the country a few years ago – but the Japanese did. The results follow. – mra.

___

» Japan’s Strategic Space Development: Onward and Upward!

By Paul Kallender-Umezu [Tokyo]

Japan is rolling up its sleeves and getting to work on beefing up its military space technologies, whether it looks like it or not.

When explaining Japan’s military space program to otherwise intelligent people whose main source of information may be only reports from the mass media, I often get blank stares. “Japan? Does Japan even have a space program?” Some might remember astronaut Naoko Yamazaki performing the important scientific task of making sushi in a kimono on the International Space Station; others might remember an asteroid mission that recently brought some cosmic dust back to Earth. But overall, when people think of Asia and space, they probably think of China’s space program, because that’s where the majority of media attention is.

The recent Hayabusa^[1]  (“Falcon”) mission is a case in point. In a seven-year journey, Hayabusa flew over 2 billion kilometers on a revolutionary new ion-engine propulsion system, overcoming technical malfunctions to collect samples from an asteroid and bring them back to Earth. The mission, which contained many firsts, was spearheaded by half a dozen eggheads on a couple of hundred million bucks (that’s trim and tremendous in the space world). But you wouldn’t know much about that if you’d read the mainstream press, which focused more on its problems than its successes.

So when I start talking about Japan’s military space programs, I often use the metaphor of a high-quality Japanese hocho – a type of kitchen knife – to describe what’s up with this strategic national technology program. As the NRA is fond of reminding people, it’s not the gun that kills, it’s the person pulling the trigger. The hocho may not be official issue in the SAS or Delta force, but this 10-inch-plus, finely crafted, durable and razor-sharp sushi-slasher is the weapon of choice for many a Japanese convenience-store robber. The shape and label point to a different application, but the sharp end still does the business. Similarly, Japan’s space program was explicitly meant for peaceful purposes right up to 2008.

Actually, Japan is a military space power with a huge toolkit of up-to-date and serviceable technologies that will keep it in the leading pack of space-faring nations, if and when it chooses to go nuclear, or if and when an orbital arms race kicks in. Sound outlandish? My book In Defense of Japan: From the Market to the Military in Space Policy (Stanford University Press, 2010)[2] goes into this exhaustively, but for a digest of some of the main issues, please read on.

Four years ago, in the SNS newsletter, I predicted that the militarization of Japan’s space program would kick into higher gear after 2010, once the nation’s almost childishly sentimental legislative breaks on such activities – a 1969 Diet resolution that limited Japan’s space development to peaceful purposes only – were removed.

This has indeed happened. In May 2008, Japan passed the Basic Space Bill establishing a national Space Headquarters for Space Policy [3](SHSP) in the Prime Minister’s Cabinet office to remove the longstanding ban on Japan’s military use of space assets and to promote Japan’s space industry. Most notably:

             Article 2 “provides that space development and use shall be conducted in accordance with international treaties and other international commitments including the Outer Space Treaty, and pursuant to the spirit of the peaceful principle of the Constitution of Japan”; and

             Article 14 requires the government to take “necessary measures to promote space development and use” that would promote both national and international security.

But before we get to that, let’s go over the technologies developed during Japan’s peaceful purposes only era:

• The MS3-II, J-1, and M-V^[4] rockets, which are readily convertible to ballistic missiles – in fact, in military circles the M-V is known as Japan’s Peacemaker (MX) because of the similarities with its American counterpart.

• Warhead re-entry technologies: Japan has tested a variety of “pods,” including the Orbital Re-Entry Flight Experiment (OREX) in1994, the Demonstrator of Atmospheric Reentry System with Hypersonic Velocity (DASH) in 2002, the EXPeriment RE-entry Space System (EXPRESS) in 1996, the Unmanned Space Experiment Recovery System (USERS) REM in 2002–2003, and the recently-become-famous Hayabusa. Japan also has the basic technologies for its own hypersonic space plane, if it wants to build one.

• Anti-Satellite (ASAT) weapons: You wouldn’t have figured this one, but  Japan is a leader in remote and autonomous space robotics, and the star-struck lovers Orihime and Hikoboshi (aka Vega and Altair), which are also the names of the chaser and target satellites on ETS-VII, remain the world’s most sophisticated to date (known) on-orbit automatic-proximity maneuvering experiments. And that was back in the late ’90s, based on technology developed the best part of 20 years ago. In what would have been an incredibly aggressive dual-ASAT program, SmartSat was going to have taken this much further, but was cut, I suspect, through political pressure.

• Spy satellites: Japan’s spysat fleet was deliberately given the name Information Gathering Satellites (IGS) to disguise the fact that they were designed to spy on North Korea, because the satellites were first designed and launched before 2008, when Japan was not supposed to have any military hardware up there.

• Optical (and hence unjammable) inter-satellite communications successfully tested by the Kirari mission; optical communications are considered the “high ground” for secure, high-bandwidth, military space communications.

• Highly accurate GPS: With the Wide-Area Augmentation System (WAAS), available since August 2000, U.S. GPS is accurate to about 2 meters; Japanese differential GPS, which will cover most of the Asia Pacific seaboard well into China and as far south as Australia, will be accurate to 25 cm.

• Last but definitely not least, Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) and direct-ascent ASAT weapon: Japan has the bits that work, in the form of its four Kongo-class Aegis destroyers and PAC-3 missile batteries. Two things to note here: a) the Aegis system can quickly be turned into an ASAT system (fashioned after the 2008 Burnt Frost response to China’s ASAT test); and b) Japan is making key hardware (nose cone, IR seeker, 2nd-stage solid rocket) for an even more capable SM3-Block 2A system.

… Of course, this is on top of all the Earth observation, meteorological, scientific, astronomical, and planetary missions launched by Japan over the last half-century, all but a handful successful.

And remember, all this was developed when Japan had theoretically committed to never developing military space technology in space. Now that that has changed, what’s new? Well, quite a lot, and much of what I predicted back in 2006 is on target or has already happened.

To understand the future of Japan’s military space development, one needs to look at two vital documents – one is by the SHSP; the other, by Japan’s Ministry of Defense, upgraded to Cabinet level from the Japan Defense Agency in January 2007. How quickly things can change. In fact, the people at Ministry of Defense (MoD) were exceptionally busy space bees, putting together the Committee on Promotion of Space Development and Basic Guidelines for Space Development and Use of Space [5] in January 2009. The commentary makes for some fascinating reading:

“In light of the major change of environment introduced by the establishment of the Basic Space Law, the Ministry of Defense will consider the necessary steps to exploit possibilities for the development and use of space in new fields of security, in concert with the comprehensive and systematic development of space as deliberated by the entire government.”

And in a summary called “Significance of Space Development and Use for Defense Purposes,” the MoD laid it on the line about what it needs and proposes for defensive military space development. In its own words:

“Due to the sophistication of military science and technology in recent years, the buildup of defense capabilities is increasingly focused on networking – the interactions of individual pieces of equipment and systems such as sensors, communication devices, command and control systems and various platforms (vehicles, vessels, aircraft, etc.) – to enable (a) sophisticated and accurate situational awareness covering a wide range, (b) real-time information sharing, (c) immediate command and control operations from remote places, and (d) precision guiding, etc., and thereby achieve systemization – maximizing of the equipment’s performance as an ensemble. For such networking and systemization of the equipment, it is extremely beneficial to take advantage of the nature of space, being a part of no national territory and is not bound by conditions such as topography, as well as to conventional systems and hardware set on the earth’s surface. For the foreseeable future, the development and use of space will be absolutely necessary for defense purposes.”

It named critical technologies as:

• Space-based information gathering, warning, and surveillance
• Space-based communications
• Space-based positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT)
• Space-based meteorological observation
• Imagery information-gathering capability (SIGINT)
• Radio wave information-gathering capability
• Early-warning capability
• Space Protection (Space Situational Awareness) against ASATS
• Independent access to space

Then the SHSP, which was tasked by the Basic Law to come up with five- and ten-10-year space plans within a year of the promulgation of the legislation, promptly delivered, releasing the Basic Plan for Space Policy[6] in June 2009. If you really want a shortcut to find out what’s probably going happen in Japan’s space development, go to the very last page, page 79, where everything is laid out on the line in just one page – almost a miracle of simplicity for Japan’s bureaucracy.

The report was remarkable in its brevity and bluntness, attributes that were in short supply for more than 40 years, when Japan tried to explain away its ballistic missile development as part of some sort of altruistic search for the stars. It was that, too, but it would have been too intellectually honest of Japan’s Education Ministry to have admitted the strategic technology development agenda behind the rhetoric. But under that, it gives the MoD exactly what it wants.

Meet the New Program, Same As the Old Program

The caveat about all this is that the MoD isn’t actually itself independently contracting these programs from Melco, IHI, MHI, NEC, etc., but, for the time being, going with the flow while the other ministries take up the slack. With clear development and budget lines to bid for, a closer look at the present and future of Japan’s military space development shows a continuum from the past programs and budget not overtly military, but actually fulfilling the MoD’s wish list sooner or later.

             GPS upgrade: With the launch of the Michibiki[7] satellite in September 2010 as part of Mitsubishi Electric’s Quasi-zenith Satellite System (QZSS), Japan will gain centimeter level (as precise as 25 cm) accuracy positioning and targeting capabilities, especially as the system fills out to its full complement of three satellites flying 36,000 km above Asia Pacific in a figure-8 loop.

             More and better IGS: Japan’s newer generation of satellites has improved optical and radar accuracy. (Optical to sub 50-cm resolution is being worked on for optical and sub-1 meter accuracy for all-weather radar sites.) There are discussions about whether to actually boost the constellation’s basic configuration of four satellites (two optical and two radar), but these seemed stalled in favor of developing a much better, cheaper, and more capable system, called ASNARO.

             ASNARO [8] spy (apologies – “earth observation”) satellites: Actually, the Advanced Satellite with New system Architecture for Observation (ASNARO) program, by the Institute for Unmanned Space Experiment Free Flyer[9]) – which is basically an organization that develops dual-use military space technology out of METI-based budget lines – looks to be a next-generation IGS-constellation, since its major purpose is to launch smaller (450kg class), sub-50-cm resolution spysats built by NEC (a specialist in small bus satellite technology). The first satellite could be up as soon as 2012, aboard Japan’s new Epsilon launch vehicle.

             Epsilon:[10] It’s difficult to know where to begin on how important this rocket is. The U.S. has been struggling to develop Operationally Responsive Space capabilities to wage war in orbit. ORS means being able to access space quickly and reliably by launching whatever number of small, micro, nano, or pico satellites (satellites ranging from 100 kg to 10 kg) needed as ASATs or ASAT defense satellites or tactical communications, spy or field observations satellites, in case of space-based war. Epsilon, due to launch in 2011 or 2012, will fly after a few years of redevelopment from the H2-A SRB and M-V rockets.

             SOD: Japan’s own version of ORS is called Space On Demand, and it’s being led by METI. In fact, ASNARO is part of this offensive to standardize, cheapen, and help quicken the pace of development of small satellites by mating them with Epsilon. Air-launch and even submarine launch are proposed. Yes, you read it correctly – METI plans to develop SLBMs – but only for happy, peaceful purposes. The fact of the matter is that a highly aggressive air-launch program was proposed by METI during the initial LDP budget request of August 2009, only to be dropped by the DPJ, which wanted, no doubt, not to offend the Chinese. Evidence of this has been wiped from the SHSP’s pages, but I still have the original paper copies to prove it. [11]

             UNIFORM: The University International Formation Mission by MEXT[12]. Hot off the press: UNIFORM is MEXT’s chance to get in on the Basic Space Law funding for microsatellites. Instead of having the MoD develop Japan’s 5 kg-10 kg satellite capabilities, Japan is using the cream of Japan’s diverse and bubbling university-based satellite building community, led by Shinichi Nakasuka, to build observation satellite constellations at a fraction of the cost. This follows on from a 4.1 billion yen investment by the Cabinet Office in university-based nano-satellite development, which ends in 2013.

Japan’s university-based microsatellite community dates back more than a decade, with most activities coordinated under the Tokyo-based University Space Engineering Consortium UNISEC[13], which comprises 47 laboratories from 38 universities that are steadily building increasingly functional satellites, faster and cheaper, with very dual-purpose possibilities. Entirely related to this is the development of microsatellite dispensers, which are – if you’ll excuse the joke – indispensible if you plan to seed orbit with our increasingly capable little friends. Japan recently demonstrated the J-POD[14] dispenser.

And that is just the beginning. More and better communications satellites are coming, and an early-warning sensor technology will be developed to bolster Japan’s already burgeoning BMD capabilities. The only missing factor at the moment seems to be programmatic haze – by which I mean, no fixed research budget, and the question of Where are the nuclear warheads? For some teasers on this, please take a look at “More News on Japan’s Strategic Nuclear / Space Hedge” and “The NHK’s ‘News’ on Japan’s Not-So-Secret Nuclearization Plan 1968-70,” on my blog called – you guessed it – In Defense of Japan.

Paul Kallender-Umezu is Japan correspondent for Space News. A graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism and winner of the Horgan Prize for Excellence in Science Writing, he has published widely in the Japanese domestic and international media. His book In Defense of Japan, co-authored with Professor Saadia M. Pekkanen of the University of Washington, was published by Stanford University Press earlier this year.

I want to thank Paul Kallender-Umezu for doing a spectacular job in bringing this information to SNS members. Paul wrote as a co-author on a past Asia Letter, and given the ongoing quality of his work, we hope he will continue for a long time coming. We owe a note of thanks to Asia Editor Scott Foster for making this connection, and for all he continues to do to help us understand Asia from the inside out. 

I would also like to thank Editor-in-Chief Sally Anderson for another fine effort and result.

Your comments are always welcome.

Sincerely,

Mark R. Anderson

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