TOKYO (AP) -- Japan has put on hold plans to develop a pilotless space shuttle it had hoped to launch in 2004, an official said Wednesday.
Development of the shuttle, which is already four years behind schedule, will be "frozen for the time being," said Mitsuyuki Ueda of the Aeronautics and Space Development Division of the Science and Technology Agency.
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Ueda said the freeze is the result of questions over how the shuttle should be launched. An advisory panel recently proposed that a reusable high-speed jet plane be used to carry the shuttle off the ground, instead of launching it atop a rocket.
Under the original plan, crafted in the 1980s, the 20-ton shuttle, called Hope X, would have been launched by a domestically developed H 2 rocket.
Watch the video of the April 2, 1994 launch of the H 2 1F rocket.
But Japan's space program has since been plagued by a string of technical glitches and financial setbacks. In one of its more recent failures, in November an H 2 was destroyed in midair after engine trouble developed and officials feared the rocket might veer out of control.
Japan originally had planned to launch the shuttle in 2000, but the National Space Development Agency requested several postponements because of tighter budgets and unspecified trouble collecting test data.
The shuttle is designed to conduct scientific experiments and ferry payloads up to 3 tons into space. It is modeled after the U.S. space shuttle.
Japan so far has spent about $238 million (26 billion yen) on the shuttle project, Ueda said.
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