TOKYO: Japan will take a major step towards setting up its first manned space facility next week, when a US shuttle is to deliver the first piece of the multi-billion-dollar lab after 20 years of development.

The Japanese laboratory, called Kibo — Japanese for “Hope” — will be established in three deliveries into space. The US shuttle Endeavour is due to take off on the first trip on March 11.

Japan, the world’s second largest economy, has few natural resources and has staked its future on advanced technology.

“Japan’s only weapon is technology,” said Yoshiya Fukuda, a senior official handling manned space projects at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

“Even if we are not the very front-runner in space development, we must be second or so,” he said. “What else can we do in a country with scant resources and lots of old people?”

Japan has set a goal of sending an astronaut to the moon by 2020, a feat achieved with fanfare in 2003 by its giant neighbour and sometime rival China.

It was in 1985 that Japan decided to join the project championed by then US president Ronald Reagan to build an orbiting International Space Station (ISS).

Development started three years later but assembly of the ISS began only in 1998 due to space shuttle accidents and budgetary problems of the participants, which now include Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia and the United States.

Endeavour is to deliver a storage room for Kibo that will eventually hold materials and devices for experiments. Veteran Japanese astronaut Takao Doi will be on board and dock the storage room at the ISS during a 16-day mission.

A flight scheduled for March 2009 will complete the Japanese lab with a porch exposed directly to outer space for experiments under a high vacuum, microgravity, solar energy and radiation.—AFP