Japan startup Space One delays Kairos No. 3 launch

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Space One has delayed of the launch of the No. 3 unit of its Kairos small rocket carrying to March. japantimes.co.jp

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Space One, a Tokyo-based startup, has postponed the launch of its Kairos No. 3 small rocket to March after what it described as a more detailed weather analysis, The Japan Times reports. The vehicle was scheduled to lift off Wednesday morning from Spaceport Kii in Kushimoto, Wakayama Prefecture, carrying five satellites. The company said it will announce a new date at least two days in advance, within a launch window running until March 25.

The delay lands on top of a more basic problem: Space One still has not completed a successful orbital flight. Kairos No. 1 and No. 2 both failed, in March 2024 and December 2024 respectively, leaving the company’s core promise—Japan’s first privately developed rocket to place a satellite into orbit—unfulfilled. Weather is a convenient and often legitimate reason to stand down, but it also highlights the part of rocketry that does not fit neatly into press releases about engines and innovation. Launch providers sell reliability, and reliability is built as much from operational discipline—range coordination, countdown procedures, ground systems, and conservative “no-go” rules—as from propulsion.

For small-launch companies, those operational choices are not cosmetic. Each scrub burns money through staffing, pad operations, customer coordination, and the opportunity cost of an idle launch site. A state program can roll such costs into multi-year budgets and treat schedule slips as a political problem; a private launcher has to price them into contracts or eat them. That pressure tends to push firms toward tighter pre-launch verification and more conservative risk acceptance, even when marketing rewards bold timelines.

Japan’s broader space policy has encouraged a domestic commercial launch ecosystem, but the market is unforgiving: satellite operators can shift manifests to foreign providers if schedules slip and insurance premiums rise. In that environment, “we delayed for weather” is not merely a safety call; it is also a test of whether the company can build the routine, repeatable processes that customers are actually buying.

The next Kairos launch date will be set with two days’ notice. Space One’s last two attempts did not reach orbit.