Japan's space agency has acknowledged that it cannot stick to its plan to launch, by the end of March 2025, what it hopes will be one of the country's mainstay rockets. An explosion occurred during a combustion test for the Epsilon S small solid-fuel rocket last week.

Officials at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, held a news conference on Thursday. They outlined what its investigative team has so far found out about the cause of the explosion. The blast happened at the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture on November 26.

The officials said detailed analyses of footage and other information showed that some of the combustion gas was not emanating from the nozzle it was supposed to come out of, but rather from a different area.
But the officials said it is not clear whether the leak led to the explosion.

The officials added that an ignition device did not melt. JAXA had earlier said that a part of the device had melted and led to an explosion during a similar test in Akita Prefecture in July of last year. The agency said it took steps to prevent a recurrence before last month's blast.

JAXA Vice President Okada Masashi is the head of the investigative team. He said it would be difficult for the agency to build a launch engine by the end of the current fiscal year, as it first has to identify the cause of the latest explosion, restore the test facilities and then successfully carry out a combustion test.