Where is Japan's equivalent of Elon Musk? Where's the young entrepreneur with a huge bank balance and dreams to match? Where is that someone raised in these isles on sci-fi manga and space movies who wants to make human travel in space a reality?

In 2011, Musk — the billionaire founder of spacecraft and rocket company SpaceX — was awarded the Heinlein Prize for Advances in Space Commercialization. That award — made by the prize's sponsoring body, the International Aeronautical Congress, in Bremen, Germany — was bestowed before his major breakthrough last month when, on May 25, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station (ISS) some 400 km above Earth.

It was the first time a privately operated spacecraft had achieved that feat, and many commentators have hailed it as the beginning of a new era of space travel.