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Japan will recruit a pool of prospective astronauts in 2021 with a view to sending them into outer space as part of a US-led lunar exploration project, the first time the nation has conducted an ingest since 2008.
Science Minister Koichi Hagiuda said the government will ask for applications around next fall, and Tokyo aims to have a Japanese citizen on the Moon for the first time in the second half of the 2020s.
Although Japan has recruited talent in the field roughly every decade since 1983, the minister of education, culture, sports, science and technology said: “We will request applications every five years from now to maintain a group of astronauts (in preparation).”
As part of the Artemis program, the United States aims to return humans to the moon by 2024 for the first time since the 1972 Apollo 17 mission of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
In July, Tokyo and Washington agreed to cooperate in the lunar exploration, led by NASA. The two countries aim to give the Japanese crew opportunities on the Gateway, a small spacecraft that will orbit the moon, and travel to the lunar surface.
Earlier this month, Japan also joined a US-led international agreement, called Artemis Accords, which seeks to establish a set of principles for space exploration, including the extraction of lunar resources.
Currently, seven Japanese astronauts are part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
When the agency last conducted an astronaut search in 2008, a record 963 people applied for the job. Kimiya Yui, 50, and Takuya Onishi, 44, were selected in February 2009 and Norishige Kanai, 43, was also selected in September of that year.
All three men have already traveled to outer space.
In the near future, veteran astronaut Soichi Noguchi, 55, plans to fly to the International Space Station aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft developed by the American aerospace manufacturer SpaceX.
The launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which will carry Noguchi and three American astronauts to the ISS, was postponed from October 31 to “no earlier than early or mid-November” due to additional revisions to the rocket, according to NASA.
© KYODO
