Featured Speaker

Professor Hajime Inoue from JAXA began his remarks by thanking the Space Foundation for awarding the agency the John L. "Jack" Swigert, Jr., Award for Space Exploration. JAXA was formed through the merger of 3 Japanese institutes: the National Aerospace Laboratory, the National Space Development Agency, and the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. JAXA focuses its efforts in the areas of space utilization, space science and exploration, and space technologies. In the past year, JAXA launched three important missions. Kaguya is a lunar remote sensing mission that, in addition to providing first rate scientific data to Earth, has delivered high-definition video images of the lunar surface. JAXA also launched Kizuna, a wideband internet engineering test a demonstration satellite. Most recently, the experiment logistics module, Kibo, was delivered and installed on the ISS by means of the Space Shuttle.