The Yoshinobu Launch Complex, also known as Launch Area Y, Area Y or LA-Y, is a launch complex at the Tanegashima Space Centre, located on Tanegashima, the Japanese island located 115 km south of Kyūshū. The complex is used for the H-II and H-IIA carrier rockets. The complex is also used by the H-IIB, which was first launched on 10 September 2009. That flight launched the HTV-1 spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station.
It is the most Northern launch complex at Tanegashima, and along with the now inactive Osaki Launch Complex, it is part of the Osaki Range, used for orbital launches. The Yoshinbou complex consists of two launch pads, however launches have only been conducted from pad 1, which was built around 1993 for the H-II programme. The second pad was completed around 2000, shortly after the H-II was retired in favour of the H-IIA, but is yet to be used for a launch. The complex also contains a test stand for firing the LE-7 engines used in the first stage of the H-II and its derivatives. Prior to launch, rockets are processed vertically in the complex's vehicle assembly building. The rocket is rolled out to the launch pad on a mobile launch platform about twelve hours before it is scheduled to launch. It takes around thirty minutes to transport the rocket from the assembly building to Pad 1.
Famous quotes containing the words launch and/or complex:
“I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made ... and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)