Momo’s rocket aborted before reaching its target distance.
The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) hasn’t made a secret of their spaceflight ambitions; they aim to put humans on the moon before China. But private spaceflight is also reaching new heights (literally) in the country. On Sunday, Momo, a startup supported partially by crowdfunding, launched Japan’s first commercial space rocket from Hokkaido. The rocket was built by Interstellar Technologies Inc.
Unfortunately, the rocket failed to reach its target altitude of 100 km. Just over a minute into launch, the ground team lost communications with the rocket. This caused an early shutdown of the engine; estimates are that it only achieved an altitude of around 20 km.
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