The Silicon Graybeard

In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer, that run from tech, science or space news to economics; from firearms to world events.

Tuesday, December 23, 2025

Followup to yesterday's mention of three stories

In the lead-in to Monday's post about Tory Bruno resigning from ULA, I mentioned that suddenly there were newsworthy stories:

I guess it figures that after several days with nothing that struck me as interesting and newsworthy, we have three such stories today. One involving United Launch Alliance (ULA), one involving Japan's H3, and the third involving a first ever attempt at an orbital launch from Brazil, from Korea's Innospace.

I happened to be playing the live coverage of the Innospace launch in the background while working on the ULA post and saw that they lost the vehicle around the time that seemed to be fairly soon after the first stage dropped and the second stage took over. That means we're down to one story, about the Japanese H3 rocket launch, and it failed during launch as well.

The H3 launched from Tanegashima Space Center on Sunday (Dec. 21) at 8:51 p.m. EST (0151 GMT and 10:51 a.m. local Japan time on Dec. 22), carrying a navigation satellite known as Michibiki 5, or QZS-5, aloft.

"However, the second stage engine’s second ignition failed to start normally and shut down prematurely," officials with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said in a statement early Monday morning (Dec. 22). "As a result, QZS-5 could not be put into the planned orbit, and the launch failed."

This was the seventh flight of an H3, and the second failure - the first was on the first launch in March of '23.

H3 at 13 seconds into flight, Dec. 21, 2025

The payload is worth mentioning as well: it was the 10,580-pound Michibiki 5, the next addition to Japan's new, home grown, Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS), a navigation network in geosynchronous orbit, very high (around 22,200 miles) above Earth.

"This system is compatible with GPS satellites and can be utilized with them in an integrated fashion," Japanese officials wrote in a description of the QZSS project.

"QZSW can be used even in the Asia-Oceania regions with longitudes close to Japan, so its usage will be expanded to other countries in these regions as well," they added.

I find that little statement that their new QZSS is compatible with GPS and can be used with them to be quite interesting.