COLUMN ONE : Japan Eyes Stardom in Space : Prospects of traversing the heavens leave the nation moonstruck over the scientific--and commercial--possibilities.

Wataru Tanaka, a science fiction writer and self-described “aerospace exploration commentator,” nearly became the first Japanese to venture into space. He hatched an outrageous plan four years ago to bring home a surplus American rocket and blast himself into orbit.

But Tanaka, 58, whose credits include a book titled “The Taste of Lettuce Eaten In Space,” gave up his dream after running into a wall of red tape. He counted 26 laws and regulations administered by six government agencies that made his extraterrestrial mission all but impossible.

Tanaka’s countrymen are not far behind, though. After decades of quiet, modest research and development that attracted scant notice from abroad, Japan’s official--and unofficial--space programs are now reaching critical mass. The effort could open yet another field where Japanese technological prowess translates into an economic challenge.

Already, Japan has become the third country, after the United States and the Soviet Union, to take aim at the moon.

On Jan. 24, a small scientific research institute run on a shoestring budget by the Education Ministry launched “Muses-A,” a lunar orbiter that, if successful, next month will become the first object from Earth to approach the moon since the Soviets sent up an unmanned probe in 1976.

And in a peculiar drama that gives a new meaning to the “space race,” Japanese government astronauts and private cosmonauts are competing to see who will be the first to take a Rising Sun flag to the heavens.

Japan’s primary space agency, the National Space Development Agency or NASDA, is training two men and a woman to serve as payload specialists on the U.S. space shuttle Atlantis in a flight scheduled for June, 1991.

At the same time, a commercial television network, Tokyo Broadcasting System, has paid a hefty sum, reportedly $10 million, to Moscow for the privilege of sending one of its journalists aboard the Soviet space station Mir in a mission that could come as early as the end of this year.

NASDA, meanwhile, is joining the European and Canadian space agencies in cooperative development of the U.S. space station Freedom. Japan is building a $2-billion laboratory module for the space station, which is expected to start orbiting the Earth in 1998.

On the immediate horizon, the Japanese are focusing their efforts on commercial satellite launchings and other practical applications, such as last Wednesday’s launch of a marine observation satellite by NASDA.

But they also have long-range plans to send astronauts aloft in their own space shuttle. The government’s Space Activities Commission proposed last June that Japan try launching its own space station by the year 2010. One of the country’s major construction companies is designing a “space hotel,” while another envisions a lunar resort offering “zero-gravity games” to shuttle-loads of Japanese tourists.

“This is the destiny of the human race,” said Akira Kubozono, executive director of NASDA. “We Japanese have decided we must pursue manned space development. It’s a dream, a romance. And if new technologies spin off in the process, we can always benefit by spreading them through industry.”

This bold vision of space development and the commercialization of related technologies may seem laughable given Japan’s meager space budget. In the current fiscal year, Japan is spending about $1.1 billion on space, or less than a tenth of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s $12.3-billion budget. NASDA has 950 employees, as opposed to about 22,000 working for NASA.

But as the Muses-A moon mission demonstrates, impressive results sometimes can be achieved without astronomical spending. The scientific organization that launched the lunar orbiter, the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), grew out of a low-key research laboratory at Tokyo University that pioneered Japan’s efforts to escape gravity in 1955 by launching 9-inch-long “pencil rockets.”

(A replica of the first Japanese pencil rocket is on display at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.)

ISAS, which now has a full-time staff of 105 and operates on a budget of about $145 million a year, has launched 19 satellites since 1970 with essentially home-grown technology. It made its first interplanetary voyage in 1985 and sent two satellites to rendezvous with Halley’s comet the following year. Muses-A is designed to test the “swing-by” technique, by which the moon’s gravitational pull will be used to catapult a second, tiny satellite into lunar orbit sometime around March 18.

“After we finish with the moon in the 1990s, we may be ready to take on Mars,” said Yasunori Matokawa, an ISAS official.

Tanaka, the writer and failed free-lance astronaut, predicts that it is only a matter of time before space fantasies start becoming reality here. When a Japanese finally flies in space, he said, the media hoopla can be expected to spark a boom in public interest and mobilize vast resources.

“Once Japanese see something with their own eyes, they can understand it,” said Tanaka, who also operates a space cafe in Tokyo called “Restaurant Goddard,” after the U.S. rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard, who pioneered liquid fuel engines.

“We’re not good at imagining things we can’t see, and at this point space exploration is entirely abstract,” Tanaka said. “But when the time comes, you can count on the Japanese to jump out in front.”

Indeed, early signs of space fever are already starting to appear. In April, Nippon Steel Corp. plans to open “Space World,” a so-called “edu-tainment” theme park on the site of its shut-down plant in Yawata, in southwestern Japan.

Under the banner of diversification, the world’s largest steelmaker will also run a space camp at the park, modeled after and licensed by the original one in Huntsville, Ala.

Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. is marketing “space food” through the health food section of a major department store chain, and Uni-Charm Corp., a leading maker of sanitary napkins and disposable diapers, is now designing products for space travel. Both these companies, along with Sony and Minolta, have lined up as commercial sponsors for the Tokyo Broadcasting System’s six-day ride aboard the Mir space station.

Toshio Nakanishi, a network spokesman, said the extravaganza was initially planned as a stunt to celebrate the commercial broadcaster’s 40th anniversary next year, but it quickly took on a deeper meaning.

“We thought it was necessary now for a Japanese to go to space,” Nakanishi said. “So far, a total of about 200 people from 20 countries have been in space, but not a single Japanese. We’re way behind, compared to the economic power we possess.”

The network plans to broadcast daily 10-minute live television spots from orbit.

Author Tanaka is disturbed by the thought that a television journalist aboard a Soviet craft may be first Japanese in space, before one of NASDA’s professionals rides on a friendly American space shuttle. (The original plan to have a Japanese payload specialist fly on the U.S. space shuttle two years ago was delayed by the Jan. 27, 1986, Challenger explosion.)

“It’s going to be a problem from a historic point of view if the first Japanese in space rides with the Soviets,” he said. “This is a highly symbolic matter. The United States is our closest ally. We owe our postwar economic prosperity to America. I don’t know where this idea comes from that you can buy whatever you want with money. We Japanese didn’t used to think like this.”

NASDA’s Kubozono was somewhat more philosophical about the network’s deal with the Soviets.

“There’s a lot of room in space,” Kubozono said. “They’re making considerable noise about who’s going to be first, but our aims are completely different. We’re in this for science, not publicity. We may have feelings about it in our hearts, but we don’t need to say anything out loud.”

Adding to the confusion over who might actually be blazing the trail for Japanese space exploration is the subtle bureaucratic rivalry between NASDA, part of the Science and Technology Agency, and ISAS, part of the Education Ministry.

NASDA is the younger of the two agencies, created in 1969 to pursue practical applications in space, and it receives the lion’s share of the space budget. ISAS is ostensibly confined to scientific research--Parliament even sets a limit on the diameter of the rockets it may build and launch, which was only recently expanded to 8 feet 3 inches.

Yet the division of labor is sometimes blurred. Both agencies are working on separate projects to develop an unmanned space plane, for example. And the fact that ISAS invented its own rocketry while NASDA imported technology from the United States, in a crash catch-up program, appears to be a lingering sore point for the latter agency. NASDA did not launch its first satellite until 1975, five years after ISAS.

Now, NASDA is exhibiting a stubborn pride--and commercial interest--in sticking to purely Japanese technology in developing the next generation of the H-II rocket, a two-stage, 108-foot-tall launch vehicle capable of carrying a two-ton payload.

NASDA’s earlier efforts were based on McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Co.’s Delta rocket, and although its current workhorse rocket, the costly H-I, is about 80% Japanese, key components such as the first-stage engine rely on imported technology. The compulsion to go it alone has resulted in some serious problems and delays in the H-II development, however.

Twice last year, the H-II’s first-stage engine, the LE-7, caught fire during tests at NASDA’s launch center on Tanega Shima, an island off Kagoshima in southwestern Japan. The problem, related to regulating the flow of liquid hydrogen into the combustion chamber, has already delayed completion of the H-II by one year, to 1993.

Although the engine is similar to those used on U.S. space shuttles, Tomifumi Godai, NASDA’s chief of launch vehicle development, dismissed the idea of turning to the Americans for help, saying Japanese engineers would be able to solve the problem by themselves. Godai also insisted that the new rocket would be a cost-effective launch vehicle, capable of carrying satellites aloft at internationally competitive prices.

Keeping the H-II development limited to 100% domestic know-how is a crucial challenge because a bilateral agreement with the United States currently gives Washington veto power over the launching of third-country satellites when U.S. technology is involved.

At stake is the potentially lucrative market for commercial satellite launching, which Arianespace, the European consortium, now dominates. But even if NASDA overcomes its H-II engine troubles, other barriers to competitiveness remain, not the least of which is an agreement with local fishermen limiting launch schedules to two 45-day windows, one in summer and one in winter. Noise from the rockets supposedly scares away the tuna.

Still, Americans who recall dismissing those first imported fleets of homely Japanese cars in the 1960s might think twice before laughing away Japanese ambitions in space. Japan went on to out-finesse the U.S. auto industry, it may be recalled, after starting very small.

And a familiar name is on the cutting edge of Japan’s space technology: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., the company that built the Zero fighter 50 years ago and more recently lobbied unsuccessfully to go it alone designing Japan’s next generation jet fighter, the FSX.

A co-development agreement to license technology from the U.S. front-line fighter, the F-16, to Mitsubishi Heavy for the FSX was nearly scuttled in a last-minute attack by critics in Washington last year. Opponents argued that the deal handed over key technology that Japan could later use to compete against the United States in the aerospace and commercial airliner industry.

A residue of mutual suspicion left by the FSX dispute, coupled with unresolved U.S. frustrations over a contentious trade complaint about American commercial satellites sales to Japanese government agencies, perhaps colors the atmosphere in cooperative space development.

According to news reports, Kubozono expressed irritation over delays in the Freedom space station program when he visited Washington recently. In general, the Japanese appear to be growing wary of relying on the United States and its vastly superior experience in space.

“You can’t depend on another country. If you don’t have advanced technology of your own, it’s impossible to truly participate in international cooperation,” said Matokawa of ISAS. “From now on, I suppose we’ll go on relying on NASA; at the same time we’ll have to develop our own independent capabilities.”