To Open The Sky

It may strike you as strange to see a Japanese design heading up the list. The fact is that, despite its troubles, Japan's space program is making great strides.

Result of a study program by the Japanese Rocket Society (JRS), Kankoh-maru is a reusable SSTO VTOL rocket designed to carry 50 passengers to 200 km Earth orbit. Since none of the space agencies of the world were studying how to make launch services available to the general public, the JRS started a Space Tourism Study Program in 1993, with the objective of getting the price of a flight to orbit down to around $10,000 per passenger. Work on the ship has grown steadily in depth and breadth ever since, and has helped to accelerate the acceptance of space tourism as the direction for space development work today.

Based loosely on earlier designs such as Gary Hudson's "Phoenix", Kankoh-maru (the name means "tourism ship") has been described in a number of publications, and is currently being further refined in the third phase of the JRS study.