A small fleet with specialist owners
Japan owns 143 active satellites as of October 17, 2026, 0.8% of the world total and the fifth largest national fleet. It has never chased numbers. The biggest category is Earth imaging, with 57 satellites, then technology demonstrations with 33 and communications with 23.
Most of the names behind those satellites are specialists. JAXA, the space agency formed on October 1, 2003, from the merger of ISAS, NAL and NASDA, is listed for 12. Two start-ups, Axelspace and Synspective, are listed for 12 and 11, and a third, QPS Labs, for 11.
What they do
Earth imaging accounts for 57 of Japan's active satellites (40%).
Where they orbit
Who operates them
The largest operators, and the largest families of satellites, owned by Japan.
By operator
By satellite family
Operator names are as written in GCAT, usually transliterated from the original language. Families group satellites by the first word of their name.
How the fleet has grown
At the end of 2005, Japan had 86 payloads in Earth orbit. By the end of 2025 it had 214.
Launches
Japan has made 145 orbital launch attempts since its first in 1966, and 4 of them in 2025. Its busiest year was 2017 with 7.
Japan's first satellite
Ohsumi, Japan's first satellite, reached orbit on February 11, 1970. It weighed 24 kg and flew on the fifth Lambda-4S rocket, after the first four attempts failed. That history shows in GCAT's launch counts: Japan's first attempt came in 1966, four years before the first success.
Since then Japan has made 145 orbital launch attempts, and its busiest year was 2017 with 7. It launched 4 times in 2025, against 181 for the United States that year.
H3, a new rocket with a rough start
Japan's current large rocket is H3, built by JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and launched from Tanegashima. Its first flight, on March 7, 2023, failed when the second stage didn't ignite, and the ALOS-3 satellite was lost. The first success came on February 17, 2024. A later flight on December 22, 2025 carrying the QZS-5 navigation satellite failed too, with JAXA suspecting the payload support structure. The older H-IIA rocket had already retired: H-IIA flight 50 on June 28, 2025 ended H-IIA operations.
A rocket's reliability shows in what a country can keep launching. Some Japanese owners fly on foreign launchers: Synspective's radar satellites go up on Rocket Lab's Electron, for example, and the Rocket Lab page has the numbers behind that rocket.
Spy satellites and radar start-ups
Japan's government runs a reconnaissance program called Information Gathering Satellite. Its first launch carried IGS 1A and 1B on an H-IIA on March 28, 2003. Japan likely started the program partly after North Korea's 1998 Taepodong-1 launch over Japan, and to have imagery independent of US cooperation. Two satellites were lost in a failed H-IIA launch on November 29, 2003.
Commercial fleets are younger. Synspective was founded in 2018 in Tokyo to operate radar (SAR) imaging satellites named StriX. Axelspace was founded in 2008 in Tokyo, and it has developed and operated 18 microsatellites and offers the AxelGlobe Earth observation platform. They're part of why the Earth imaging group is so large for a fleet of this size.
Where Japanese satellites orbit
92 of the 143 fly in the lowest band, 27 in geosynchronous orbit and 20 in the upper low band. Six belong to the Michibiki family, the navigation satellites that QZS-5 was meant to join.
Japan doesn't launch most of its own: 56 of its 143 active satellites flew on Japanese rockets, 32 on American rockets, 31 on Electron rockets credited to New Zealand and 12 on rockets credited to France. Small start-up fleets are the reason, since Rocket Lab's Electron carries so many of them.
Japan's spacecraft have also gone further out. Hayabusa launched May 9, 2003 and returned asteroid samples on June 13, 2010, and SLIM soft landed on the Moon on January 19, 2024; the countries that have landed on the Moon page puts that in context. For Japan's neighbors, see China and South Korea.