"Japanese space engineers could just possibly be the most boring people on the face of the Earth," laughed an aeronautics engineer working for JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), during a brief interview with The Japan Times.
The chat took place just after a major industry screening of the much touted, long-awaited movie "Hayabusa." The film is about a successful Japanese space explorer vehicle that shot off in 2003, reached the asteroid Itokawa (named after professor Hideo Itokawa, the country's revered father of rocket science) and brought back a stone sample from its surface.
The engineer (who didn't want his name published) made the observation not in the spacious screening theater in downtown Tokyo but at the Tsukuba Space Center some 200 km away.