The Japanese Rocket Society’s Rocket Symposia were held on six occasions from 1995 to 2001, where new technical and other essential topics were discussed and ideas were exchanged from concerned communities of rocket engineers, civil aviation and others in order for making general public “space tourism” happen. The objective of the study was to identify the issues that were never taken into consideration in expendable launch vehicle’s design and operation, and is to figure out the goal of space transportation architecture, particularly from the viewpoint of “real” commercialization and large scale transportation between the ground and low earth orbit. Considerations and assessments for achieving passenger safety, medical aspects, and regulations needed to allow civil airline-type operations, were made extensively together with necessary technical issues.

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The Japanese Rocket Society (JRS) proposed a draft the “Spaceworthiness” standard for future commercial space tour vehicles in 2000. “Spaceworthiness” is a coined word. It is a safety standard for future commercial passenger space vehicles, parallel to the existing airworthiness standard for aircraft. On the other hand Kankoh-maru was designed in 1995 as a result of the first phase of space tourism study in the JRS. Therefore Kankoh-maru design dose not completely satisfy “Spaceworthiness” standard. This paper describes the result of the reconsideration of the Kankoh-moru design with respect to the “Spaceworthiness” standard.

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The world-wide publicity received by the first private flight to space by the piloted spaceplane “SpaceShipOne” in June 2003 drew attention to the project's very low cost not much more than 1/1,000 of Nasa’s annual budget. The flights were also the first concrete proof that it may be possible also to reach Earth orbit at far lower cost than that of government space agencies. If this is achieved, it could create a major new global passenger travel industry comparable to civil aviation, as well as making the resources of space easily accessible for human use.

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We performed telescopic observations of Leonids radiant with CCD cameras on 2001 November 18. The precise positions of two radiant points corresponding to the dust trails of Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle’s perihelion passages in 1699 and 1 866 were predicted by McNaught and Asher. We employed a new line-detection method and tried to separate these two points. This method integrates the pixel values of a CCD image along a line direction, which enables us to detect 30-times fainter meteors than when using the usual detection methods. It can also precisely determine the angle of the line direction. Radiant points of the 2001 Leonids derived by this method were found to be consistent with those predicted by McNaught and Asher. We also measured the flux and magnitude distribution of faint meteors and succeeded in detection of faint meteor under 1O-magnitude. The cumulative flux of faint meteors is exponential growth with the index number of 2.1, and the flux 4.3 x 10(^-4) x km(^-2)s(^-1)(mag≤+11). We have found no apparent cutoff in the magnitude range brighter than 11-magnitude.

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