The 2013 file introduced JAXA as a young agency with a charming talking robot, and it badly undersold them. This is the space program that flew a broken spacecraft home from an asteroid in 2010 on an engine its team rewired in orbit, and that in 2024 landed on the Moon nose-down with its solar cells facing the wrong way and survived anyway, the fifth country to make it and the only one to do it sideways. What defines JAXA is small budgets, genuinely hard science, and a refusal to let a broken machine die. Japan still cannot launch its own astronauts, but a deal with NASA puts one in line to be the first non-American to walk on the lunar surface. The Epsilon rocket the old file bet on stumbled, and H3 became the workhorse the hard way, while Kirobo, the talking robot from the 2013 file, came home in 2015 holding a Guinness record. Next comes a mission to bring home a piece of a moon of Mars.
In June 2010 a small Japanese spacecraft came home from an asteroid and cremated itself doing it. Hayabusa had spent seven years getting out to a space rock called Itokawa and back, and almost nothing had gone to plan: a fuel leak, dead reaction wheels, a sampling mechanism that may or may not have fired, weeks of radio silence, ion engines failing one by one until the team wired the working halves of two broken thrusters into a single working one. It limped the last stretch on that improvised engine, and when it hit the atmosphere over the Australian outback it tore into a long streak of fire, having first thrown clear the one capsule that mattered. Inside were the first grains anyone had ever collected from the surface of an asteroid.
The file this archive opened on Japan in 2013 has none of that. It introduced a young agency still finding its feet, a veteran astronaut aboard the ISS, and a small talking robot - charming, and a long way short of the whole story. The robot was real, and so was the limp home three years before it. That is the JAXA the original file undersold: not much money, genuinely hard science, and an almost unreasonable refusal to let a broken spacecraft die.
The roots run deeper than the young agency the original files. Japan's space program started in 1955 with a pencil - a 23-centimetre solid rocket a Tokyo professor fired horizontally across a test stand to measure how it flew. From a pencil to an asteroid took fifty-five years, and most of the interesting part happened in the science lab. A solar sail called IKAROS unfurled in 2010 and actually sailed on sunlight, the first craft ever to do it. A Venus orbiter, Akatsuki, missed its orbit that same year when its main engine cracked apart, and five years on JAXA flew it back around the Sun and eased it into orbit using the small attitude thrusters that were never built for the job. Hayabusa2 ran the asteroid gauntlet again and made it look easy: it fired a copper slug into asteroid Ryugu to punch a fresh crater, scooped material from under the surface, and set it down on Earth in 2020 in perfect shape.
The pattern held on the Moon. In January 2024 a lander called SLIM, "Moon Sniper," touched down within about ten metres of its target - the most precise lunar landing anyone had managed - and did it while tipping nose-first onto the surface, because an engine nozzle fell off in the last seconds of descent. Pointed the wrong way with its solar cells dead, it should have been finished. Instead it woke when the sun crossed the sky, called home, and survived three freezing lunar nights it was never built to see. Japan became the fifth country to land on the Moon, sideways and against the odds.
The 2013 file pinned Japan's future on two things, and the decade was unkind to both. It heralded the new Epsilon rocket as the dawn of a cheaper era; Epsilon then stumbled, and the genuinely new rocket, H3, arrived only after blowing its own first flight in 2023 and taking a satellite down with it, before recovering in 2024 to become the workhorse. And the talking robot, Kirobo, came home in 2015 holding a Guinness record for the highest-altitude conversation in history - a lovely footnote, even if robot astronauts never did take over the way that moment imagined. JAXA's actual triumphs outran both bets.
What Japan still has never done is launch its own astronauts. What it has instead is a deep seat at everyone else's table: the Kibo laboratory is the single largest room on the ISS, and a new freighter, HTV-X, has taken over keeping the station supplied. The payoff is on the Moon. Under a deal with NASA, Japan is building a pressurised rover for Artemis - a crewed lunar car, Toyota among the builders - and in return a Japanese astronaut is in line to be the first non-American to set foot on the lunar surface. A Canadian, Jeremy Hansen, has already become the first non-American to round the Moon, on Artemis II, so the surface is the seat still open.
The harder edges are real. The Tokyo company ispace has now put two landers into the Moon the hard way, in 2023 and again in 2025, with a third attempt due in 2027. Another Japanese firm, Astroscale, is building a quieter business, chasing down dead satellites and spent rocket stages to inspect them and drag them out of orbit, which is either janitorial or visionary depending on how crowded you think orbit is about to get.
Late in 2026 an H3 is due to launch MMX, a mission to reach the Martian moon Phobos, scrape up a few grams, and carry them back - the first sample ever returned from the Mars system, due home in 2031. A joint mission with India will go hunting for water ice at the lunar south pole. And somewhere in the queue is the day a Japanese boot presses into lunar dust. For a program that opened by firing a pencil across a workbench, the to-do list now reads like science fiction, and the one thing the 2013 file had exactly right is that JAXA tends to get there quietly, and tends to get the broken version home anyway.