Japan’s space agency said it sent a self-destruct order to its Epsilon rocket after a failed launch on Wednesday because a problem meant the vehicle could not fly safely.
The unmanned rocket launched satellites into orbit on its sixth mission to demonstrate “innovative” technologies.
“The missile cannot continue safe flight because it would pose a hazard if it hits the ground,” a JAXA official said in TV commentary.
“So we took measures to avoid such an incident and we sent the signal (to destroy the missile),” he said, adding that information about the cause of the problem is not immediately available.
It was Japan’s first failed missile launch since 2003, and public broadcaster NHK said the self-destruct order was issued about 10 minutes after launch.
A JAXA livestream of the launch from the Uchinoura space center in Kagoshima, southern Japan, was interrupted and presenters said there had been a problem, without giving details.
The Epsilon solid fuel rocket has been in use since 2013.
Smaller than the country’s previous liquid-fuel model, it is a successor to the M-5 solid-fuel rocket, which was phased out in 2006 because of its high cost.
JAXA describes Epsilon as “a solid-fuel rocket designed to lower the threshold to space…and herald an age when anyone can actively use space”.
A box-shaped satellite carried by the rocket, named RAISE-3, was expected to orbit the Earth for at least a year, according to a JAXA data sheet on the mission, dubbed Innovative Satellite Technology Demonstration-3.
Universities, research institutes and companies were invited to develop new technologies to try them out on RAISE-3.
They ranged from Tokyo Metropolitan University’s “Pulsed Plasma Thruster” to an experiment on “Energy Harvesting with (a) Lightweight Integrated Origami Structure”.
In addition to RAISE-3, eight microsatellites were also launched from the Epsilon rocket, the data sheet said.
Japan’s last failed space rocket launch was in 2003, when the country canceled the launch of two spy satellites to monitor North Korea.
