Ogasawara said MHI introduced robotic manufacturing assistants to support other elements of rocket production, such as tanks. “This might affect our plan in the end. WASHINGTON — Mitsubishi Heavy Industries still expects to conduct the maiden flight of Japan’s H3 rocket this year, notwithstanding the coronavirus pandemic. MHI has completed one launch this year, orbiting an Information Gathering Satellite for the Japanese military using an H2A rocket in February. MHI has announced one commercial H3 mission for British satellite operator Inmarsat, scheduled for 2022. While H3 is designed to complete all the missions the H2A and H2B handle, Ogasawara said MHI will keep flying H2A rockets until 2023, providing a transition window for conservative customers like the Japanese military. The country’s numbers have stayed low despite being one of the first countries outside China with a confirmed case of the disease. The H3 Launch Vehicle is being jointly developed by JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) to launch a wide variety of commercial satellites. The next-generation rocket, which started development in 2014, will launch as MHI’s last mission of the year, following three H2A missions carrying satellites and one H2B mission to resupply the International Space Station. Once the Kounotori-9 launch is complete, MHI will modify the H2B launchpad at Tanegashima to enable H3 missions, he said. For this case, it denotes launch will occur no earlier than 1 April 2020, and no later than 31 March 2021 Integrated testing of the full rocket will follow, leading up to a final first-stage static-firing at Japan’s Tanegashima Island spaceport just prior to launch, he said. While the H3-32 would have provided greater performance, JAXA cited H3 will have a "dual-launch capability, but MHI is focused more on dedicated launches" in order to prioritize schedule assurance for customers.A Japanese Fiscal Year starts in April of the year and ends in March of the next year. The letter at the end shows the length of the payload fairing, either short, or "S", or long, or "L". The H3 … The single-stick version of the H3 rocket is not a "heavy lifter," but with four solid rocket boosters the rocket can deliver a healthy 8 tons to geostationary transfer orbit. MHI completed first-stage hot-fire tests with the H3’s LE-9 liquid-oxygen and liquid-hydrogen engines early this year, he said. H3 will replace the current H2A and H2B launch systems MHI fields. Nonetheless, the International Olympic Committee agreed March 24 to postpone the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games to 2021.Ogasawara, in an interview at the Satellite 2020 conference in Washington earlier this month, said MHI has remained productive on H3 despite many employees required to telework amid school closures and other social distancing measures taken to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Ogasawara said the Kounotori-9 mission is the ninth and final launch of the H2B, a high-power variant of the H2A that has two LE-7A first-stage engines instead of one. JAXA awarded MHI a contract to build the new launcher in 2014, and included in the rocket’s procurement a requirement that the price per kilogram drop by 50 percent. JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries were in charge of preliminary design, the readiness of ground facilities, dev… The first H3 is planned to be launched in the fiscal year 2020.The development of the H3 was authorized by the Japanese government on 17 May 2013.Firing tests of the LE-9 first-stage engine began in April 2017.In earlier plans, the first H3 was to be launched in fiscal year 2020 in the H3-30 configuration which lacks solid-rocket boosters, and in a later configuration with boosters in FY2021.The H3 Launch Vehicle is a two-stage rocket. The launch will carry JAXA’s Advanced Land Observation Satellite, ALOS-3, he said. Mere minutes later, its fearsome rockets will propel it - Japan and the planet's next-generation launch vehicle - into space. Our greatest strength is that we provide total support from contract to launch and we will deliver satellites to any place on the target date. The first digit represents the number of LE-9 engines on the main stage, either "2" or "3". MHI conducted hot-firing tests of the rocket's LE-9 first-stage engines early this year.
“[The] coronavirus situation is quite unclear and may get worse globally,” Ko Ogasawara, MHI’s vice president and general manager for space systems, said by email March 23.