Over a year has passed since the PDAS-X06 unmanned experimental aircraft, part of a space travel project, crashed into the sea off Shimojishima Airport in the city of Miyakojima, Okinawa Prefecture.

PD Aerospace, the Nagoya-based developer of the aircraft, aims to realize space travel by manned spacecraft from the airport under the Shimojishima Spaceport Project, which was signed between the company and Okinawa Prefecture in September 2020.

Under the project, the company’s spacecraft, which is designed to fly to an altitude of 100 kilometers, will allow passengers to experience a state of weightlessness for about five minutes. Originally, the company had planned to launch space travel in 2025, sending 100 passengers to space that year and gradually increasing capacity to 1,000 by 2030.

However, the plan is far behind schedule.

After last year’s crash, the company began developing the next unmanned aircraft, aiming to carry out another test flight in 2027, which will be followed by the development of a manned spacecraft and the start of space travel in the future.

PD Aerospace is allowed to use the airport and prefectural land in the vicinity to develop and test aircraft. The PDAS-X06, about 400 kilograms in weight and 4.9 meters in length, was developed in a hangar on the airport grounds, and was designed to fly to an altitude of 8 km. It had been repeatedly tested on the runway before the first test flight on June 28 last year.

During the test flight, communication between the aircraft and the ground control was lost two minutes after takeoff. The aircraft switched to autopilot mode and automatically shut down its engines as it approached outside the test airspace. It then fell into the sea, with the impact of the landing wrecking its body.

An analysis by the company revealed that the incident was caused primarily by a malfunction of the tracking equipment keeping up with the aircraft's trajectory.

The space travel project, which was already behind schedule, faced further delays in July that year when the transport ministry declared the crash an "aviation accident" due to the massive damage inflicted to the fuselage — the first such declaration for an unmanned aircraft.

Shuji Ogawa, head of PD Aerospace who also serves as chief engineer, emphasized that "It was neither a failure nor an accident.”

Ogawa said the company had explained to the local fishers' cooperative that the aircraft might fall into the sea during the test flight and that the cooperative had given its consent in advance.

“The aircraft performed as designed, and the safety functions, including the autopilot system, worked perfectly,” he said. Noting that numerous lessons were learned from the test flight, Ogawa said the company has been able to acquire the minimum necessary technology for the development of the next unmanned aircraft, which is designed to reach an altitude of 80 km.

Currently, other regions in Japan are also proceeding with their own "spaceport" projects in cooperation with the private sector. Besides those operated by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, there are four spaceports being developed.

Among them, Shimojishima Airport and Oita Airport are "horizontal type," from which spacecraft would take off horizontally by utilizing their long runways, while Nanki-Shirahama Airport in Wakayama Prefecture is a “vertical type” where rockets can be launched.

The town of Taiki in Hokkaido, which has been trying to attract the aerospace industry for about 40 years, has the Hokkaido Spaceport that caters to both horizontal and vertical takeoffs. The facility went into full-scale operations in 2021.

However, not all projects are going smoothly. In Oita, a U.S. company that had planned to launch a spacecraft went bankrupt last year. In Wakayama, the launch of a small rocket failed in March this year.

Ogawa of PD Aerospace says each region is making the most of its unique features and working to compete with each other in a positive way. “It’s a matter of fact that it is difficult,” he said of his space travel project at Shimojishima Airport. “We will just do the best we can,” he said.

This section features topics and issues from Okinawa covered by The Okinawa Times, a major newspaper in the prefecture. The original article was published July 4.