The recently elected Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced a new goal for Japan on Dec. 28 at a meeting of the Strategic Headquarters for Space Development at the Prime Minister’s office ("Kantei") in Tokyo. He took office in October 2021.
“We will promote the Artemis plan to carry out manned activities on the Moon, and in the latter half of the 2020s, we will aim to realize the lunar landing of Japanese astronauts,” he said.
The meeting was to lay out a revised space policy roadmap that Kishida has submitted for cabinet approval for Japan’s new fiscal year, which begins April 1. The roadmap elaborates, “we plan to land a Japanese [astronaut] on the Moon by the late 2020s, to realize the goal of becoming the first non-American to do so.”
