Express

Express [DARA]

Express (Experiment Re-entry Space System) was a bii-national (Germany, Japan) project for a small, micro gravity and reentry research spacecraft. The spacecraft was procured from Khrunchev for a cost of 30 Mio. DM.

The payload used a Russian-built reentry vehicle, based on an ICBM reenty vehicle, a Russian built service module, derived from the OGCh (FOBS) fractional orbital bombing system, and the launch was carried out by the Japanese ISAS space agency on a M-3S-2 [KM-M}. It was due to land in the Australian desert after a five day flight, but the thrust vector control on the second stage malfunctioned 103 seconds after launch, and the fourth stage and payload entered a 110 × 250 km × 33 deg orbit, instead of the intended 270 km × 380 km one. This failure was probably due to second-stage attitude-control oscillations that exhausted attitude-control fuel, probably caused by the heavy payload. The reentry capsule reenterd in Ghana, where it was retrieved.

The reentry vehicle carried two CATEX materials processing ovens, and three German (CETEX, PYREX and RAFLEX) and one Japanese (RTEX) heat shield material reentry experiments.