Archive for 6月, 2011


ASNARO Project Upate: Part I

Filed Under: ASNARO, NEC, Space on Demand, USEF by admin — コメントする
2011年6月30日

USERS SEM Deorbiting Pod

I was lucky enough recently to spend a day interviewing great people at METI, USEF, Pasco and NEC a little while back and managed to nail down many more details about what is happening with the ASNARO (Advanced Satellite with New system Architecture for Observation) project. For some Space News background on ASNARO, please see my original story. This time, specifically METI asked me to write about it for them, and gave tremendous help getting NEC and Pasco on board. It was just wonderful meeting people with ideas and strategies that are obviously well thought out.

Let’s get the disclaimer out of the way first.

From where we are standing, from the point of view of national security space, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if NEC succeeds in its strategy to turn the ASNARO/Nextar branded modular satellite platform into a commercial success in/for ASEAN countries. Of course it matters to NEC, because they are a private company and want to make more profit.

And of course it matters to me, because for the health of NEC and Japan’s military industrial base, it’s better that they sell or get more SE Asian nations to “buy” them through ODA and I wish them every luck.

But, at the end of the day, IF ASNARO/Sasuke/ Nextar never makes a successful commercial go of it, the Japanese government is still going to make sure the platform is built. And we predict that ASNARO will play its role in Japan’s emerging national space security infrastructure.

ASNARO is crucial to a number of players in a number of ways. After years of false starts and what may have been blind alleys — MDS-1 Tsubasa or OICETS Kirari spring to mind ;-) -

-Nextar represents what NEC has been trying to build since the late 90s (1998 if my memory serves me right, see NEC unveils prototype bus, aims for Teledesic, this being the non-Space News version) and the era of Hiroaki Shimayama and Takenori Yanase. Nextar, which looks suspiciously like a reworked OICETS/ MDS bus to me, and it’s the keystone of their pan-Asian commercial turnkey systems strategy.

We’ll go into this in Part II.  In Part III, we’ll look at the military angle, but only when the official article is published in Defense News.

So what is ASNARO?

ASNARO is a USEF powerplay to develop a bus system that on one hand will give NEC a chance to compeat in the ASEAN market for EO sats, and whether or not that succeeds, gives Japan the option to build a constellation of spysatellites, all kicked of with a tiny down-payment of 6 billion yen.

Therefore ASNARO is important to METI to show that its decades-long investment in creating standardized satelite bus systems and plug and play and COTs parts at USEF is finally paying off. Those of you  who have read In Defense of Japan know that we more or less regard USEF as METI’s DARPA, or military space arm, although USEF wouldn’t be comfortable with this description. Afterall, the technologies they develop are for peaceful purposes only. Right?

(I still vividly remember the change in body language when discussing with USEF how accurate USERS’s SEM -see image above- could be made).

Leaving aside the dual-use nature of many USEF projects, ANSARO is a vital component in what METI had been calling its Space on Demand (SOD) program, which, while it doesn’t actually use military language, leves very little to the imagination. Submarine launch, air launch (and with Epsilon) mobile launch! Reprogrammable satellites…”flexible” ground systems (we’ll get to that one in Part III).


Incidentally, the other main submarine space launch vehicle I know of  is the R-29R Vysota “Stingray” SLBM rebranded Volna and its peaceful brotherhood for lobbing payloads into LEO instead of  3x 300 kiloton-yield warheads at…wherever.

Behind this, ASNARO is a platform technology that also enables NEC to supply ISAS with SPRINT-series satellites, and could become a key part of Japan’s ODA strategy to counter China’s building influence in ASEAN. Hitherto, APRSAF has been a bit of a highly amicable talking shop. More about that in Part II.

Anyway, here is the Space News article with some of the bear-bones details. More to follow in Parts II and III.

Space News article by Paul Kallender-Umezu

ASNARO Delayed but far from Doomed!

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Briefing Eurasia Group on In Defense of Japan on Friday

Filed Under: 未分類 by admin — コメントする
2011年6月29日

Saadia and I are looking forward to briefing the Eurasia Group on In Defense of Japan, following their invitation for us to follow up on our talk to the Institute for Contemporary Asian Studies (ICAS) at Temple on June 3rd. Many thanks to Robert for that!

The talk at Temple was an outstanding success, with many many questions, and we are still following up. Of particular interest was that Japanese think tanks have started to take notice. As little as two years ago, I feel our talk would have been seen as controversial, but now discussion is deemed acceptable. And so it should be. That was also the point…

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U.S. Space Command Review of In Defense of Japan

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2011年6月29日

Saadia and I were complimented indeed to have In Defense of Japan reviewed by no less than U.S. Space Command’s High Frontier Journal.

This follows on from a favorable review by no less than Foreign Affairs in the January/February 2011 edition.

The review by Dr. Rick W. Sturdevant, deputy historian of Air Force Space Command, concludes with the assessment that our book might serve as “a model for historically grounded analyses of other national space policies and programs.”

We hope so, and that was the point.

We felt (and feel) that Japan’s highly successful strategic policy of technonationalism  is very poorly understood, and Japan’s space program is poorly served by mass media and its tropes.

You know the score: when you really know about something, what you read in the mass media about it just often doesn’t  make sense, or contains editorial bias. As a mea culpa, I’m one of the people fundamentally responsible for this when I wrote several dozen articles for Space News back in the late 90′s plotting each twist and turn of some very real technology problems that had surfaced, followed by budget cuts.

Saying that, Time has been a notable exception.

In the age of Twittering and instant recycling of PR,  the need for good, old-fashioned research and sourcing of information becomes ever more important.

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Michibiki: Finally Licence to Guide

Filed Under: Positioning and Targeting, QZSS, 未分類 by admin — コメントする
2011年6月15日

After 15 years and twists and turns that made IHI/Nissan’s bid for the J-1A->J-2->GX look like a skip around the block, Michibiki will finally become an openly accepted part of Japan’s emergent space-based national security structure.

There has always been a strong element of “aw-shucks, you don’t say” about the real purpose of the QZSS system, which is to provide a highly advanced (15cm to 1m positioning accuracy) sovereign (encrypted = military signal) positioning (read targeting) local (read regional) GPS system, that’s useful for…the same uses as the original GPS and GLONASS systems.

Although the what become the present system originated out of Melco and the old CRL (Communications Research Laboratory, now NICT) in 1996/7. I can still remember the pitch, and then the huge wrangle between the STA and MOFA with the U.S. over it. I covered this for Space News what, 14 and 13 years ago now.

In a recent conversation I had with a former GSDF general who is now a consultant for a major Japanese IT firm consulting the MOD to fight Japan’s cyberwars against 30,000 state-funded Chinese hackers, making sure QZSS has targeting capability has been formally on the table in inter-ministerial meetings (well at that time the MOD was the JDA) since at least 2005. In fact, retired general “X,” as we’ll call him, brought QZSS up unilaterally. The topic we were discussing was  the utility of UAVs and network-centric warfare and the limits of interoperability. The main issue for X was concern that Japan be capable of building a “rec’n'rocket” Global Hawk capability as well as a tactical capability so that battlefield, operations and strategic roles can be fulfilled. And then, as he put it, “there is the space element” of which QZSS or its successor will no doublt play a role…

2005. 2005. Well, well, well. Wasn’t that  time when the now-defunct ASBC (Advanced Satellite Business Corporation), who were responsible for window-dressing QZSS as an orbital Wall-Mart communications and broadcasting and “man nabi” system, gave me a very 玉虫色 (tamamushiiro) response about if they were talking to the JDA about the QZSS’s dual-uses.

The business model for QZSS as pounded out by ASBC didn’t make sense. Why would we need man-nabi from a keitai with an expensive chip plugged into a space-based system when nabi functions were already commonplace. Why would we need broadcasting when we already had BS* by NHK, and SKY PerfecTV washing our brains out with hundreds of channels of digital junk. SkyPerfect being the consolidated rump of what had been  DirecTV, PerfecTV and JSky B competing in Japan’s limited market, and JSAT competing with Mitsubishi’s SCC as a platform service providers. (SCC lost and was merged into JSAT). So there goes your business model.

As we make clear in In Defense of Japan, “..although the QZSS/Michibiki itself is a product of the 2000s, the system as a whole represents the culmination of eff orts to develop a regional GPS system dating back to the late 1980s.  Like a lot of the other space- based technologies discussed in this book, this one has had a long trajectory…”

More precisely, like everyone else, Japan realized that the space-based force muliplier technology and infrastruture, with gave birth to RMA, completely outdated militaries not similarly equipped in practically anything other than low-intensity conflicts. Thus the gearing up by Europe (Galileo), China (Beidou) (not exactly friends those two with the snooty French keeping the receipe for roast canard separate while the Chinese attempt to spice the whole affair up with illiberal doses of General Tao’s Sauce)  and and Japan (Michibiki) to develop its own PNT capability in case it was denied access or remained dependent on U.S. technology.

In the 1990s, the STA, METI, and the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), looked to develop a positioning system that would cover a large swathe of Asia, from the Kurile Islands to the north, China to the east, and Guam in the south. In March 1997 the then STA asked what was then NASDA (now JAXA) to move ahead with research into the highly accurate, satellite-mounted atomic clocks needed for a high-precision GPS. This was billed at the time as a matter of “economic security.” As anyone who understands Japan’s nomenclature, “economic security” is a fine bedfellow of “security” and his old chum “national security.”  The facinating story of how Michibiki got developed is summarized in In Defense of Japan. Meanwhile, as my recent story in Space News below tries to make clear, the curtains have been drawn open, and people in Japan are starting to talk about Michibiki’s national security role more openly.

*BS means Broadcasting Satellite in Japan, not “the other” meaning.

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Lockheed will Offer Local Production for F-35

Filed Under: Alliance Issues, Defense News, F-35, F-X, 未分類 by admin — コメントする
2011年6月14日

Interesting news a little while back with Lockheed Martin in town to get the F-35 Lightening-II RFP on track for Japan’s F-X.

First of all, here is an earlier story  Boeing, Lockheed, BAE To Vie for Japan’s F-X I filed about the F-X procurement, which lays out some of the key issues.

Speaking to Japan F-35 Campaign Director John Balderston, it was truly impressive to see photos of the F-35 test flying, and the production line; the key message being whatever else you may have read, the F-35 is one hot flying machine.

Balderston’s message was three-fold about the F-35: sure, the program was re-scheduled, and it’s a complex machine, but he promised should Japan choose the F-35, LM will do its best to deliver by 2016, for an average price of $65 million- well below some of the costs we’ve seen, and local production. But, as I said in my article for Defense News below, there is a catch. My sources in Japan say that MHI really doesn’t mind which plane they build, as long as they get work.

However the deeper issue is technology transfer. Lockheed Martin seem to be offering more that just final assembly, but they are stopping short of licensed production. While MHI sees production here as critical to keep its military aerospace business going, strategically, Japan needs and wants in on the F-35′s stealth technology since the U.S. has already roped off the F-22.

A clue as to what sort of agreement might be the starting point for talks is here.

Of course behind that is the spin-on issue: as readers of Dick Samuels will know, Japan’s aerospace industry was rebuilt on the F-86 and T-33 with Lockheed supplying the machine tools  to MHI and KHI (in fact the for the F-86 over 2,000 separate tool designs were transferred) that gave Japan its statistical quality control systems. (And a lot of great stories by one of my heroes, Chuck Yeager!)

Meanwhile Eurofighter and Boeing both have great offerings. If we forget that Japan feels it needs what is the highest technology solution to show China it means business, and that alliance issues mean that buying the F-35 will be the most comfortable diplomatic solution, the Eurofighter and Super Hornet can both fulfill Japan’s defense needs. BAE tell me that this RFP has been excellent- open and transparent and because of this, BAE and Boeing both feel that they are in with a fighting chance.

Anyway, here is the article I filed a few weeks back.

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