Ohsumi

Lambda 4S Launcher No. 5 stood on its rail at Kagoshima Space Center on the afternoon of 11 February 1970, pointed out over the Pacific from the Ohsumi Peninsula. The University of Tokyo team behind it had been here four times before, between 1966 and 1969, and each time the little rocket had failed. At 1:25 p.m. local time the fifth attempt thundered away from the coast, carrying the hopes of a nation whose rocketry program had begun with pencil-sized test vehicles only fifteen years earlier.

By superpower standards the Lambda 4S barely qualified as a launch vehicle. It stood 16.5 metres tall, weighed 9.4 tonnes at ignition, burned solid propellant in all four stages, and carried no active guidance at all; engineers flew it with a gravity-turn technique, a choice shaped in part by domestic political sensitivities about guided rockets and missiles. The payload was equally modest: Ohsumi, a roughly 24-kilogram capsule named for the peninsula below, carrying little more than thermometers, accelerometers and radio transmitters powered by a small silver oxide-zinc battery.

Two and a half hours of silence followed while the satellite circled the planet. Then, at 3:56 p.m., the antennas at Uchinoura picked up Ohsumi's beacon returning from its first revolution, and Japan became the fourth nation to orbit a satellite on its own rocket, after the Soviet Union, the United States and France, and the first in Asia. The triumph was brief and long at once. Higher-than-expected temperatures drained the battery within about fifteen hours, but the silent satellite kept circling for 33 years, finally burning up over North Africa on 2 August 2003.