Bradley Perrett covered China, Japan, South Korea and Australia. He is a Mandarin-speaking Australian.
Before joining Aviation Week in 2006 he was a macroeconomics, politics and aerospace journalist with Reuters. Perrett holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Macquarie University, Sydney. He left Aviation Week in 2020.
DUAL-USE: Although the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is developing its new Advanced Solid Rocket (Aerospace DAILY, Nov. 10) as a civilian launcher, there may be an ancillary reason for Tokyo to fund the program: to sustain the country’s technological base in building large solid-propellant rockets so that it could rapidly develop ballistic missiles with that know-how if it suddenly needed to. “I would be amazed if the Japanese government did not have at least one eye on the potential military applications of the technology,” says Prof. Bernard Loo of the S.
BEIJING — A Chinese fighter of nominally the same technology generation as the Lockheed Martin F-22 will soon enter flight testing, while a jet airlifter larger than the Airbus A400M should be unveiled by the end of this year, officials said. The new fighter “is currently under development,” says deputy air force chief Gen. He Weirong, adding that it “may soon undertake its first flight, quickly enter flight testing and then quickly equip the forces.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) hopes next year to begin full-scale development of its three-stage Advanced Solid Rocket (ASR), with a first launch to follow in 2012 or 2013. To be built by IHI Aerospace, the ASR is Japan’s proposed future launcher for medium scientific payloads.
