May 142015
A brief article on a Japanese mini-shuttle, photographed from an issue of “Space World” magazine a few months back (sadly, I didn’t catch the date of the article, but it would have been sometime in the early/mid 1980’s). This is, I believe, an early design of the “HOPE” spaceplane which was more or less Japans answer to the French Hermes spaceplane. This mini-shuttle would have been a little bigger than the Dyna Soar from twenty years earlier, but equipped not only with its own onboard rocket propulsion system but also a pair of turbojets of atmospheric propulsion.
