After a month after I finished watching Space Brothers, I finally decided to watch
this entire series in one day. I had seen its name a few times before, including in
the NASASpaceflight forum, but I hadn't seen it until now.
It was pretty cool. This is the premise: a private Japanese spaceflight agency called the "Solomon Space Association" (SSA, named so because they launch from the [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Islands"]Solomon Islands[/ame]*), that wants to get into the business of manned satellite repair suffers from several failures of its newest rocket (which resembles the H-IIA, except much smaller), forcing them to use an older launch vehicle (the aforementioned "Titan-looking thing") with less capacity, that being about 1.1 tonnes to low Earth orbit.
The problem is that the astronauts that fly the capsule would have to weigh a lot less.
Meanwhile, a high school girl named Yukari Morita travels to the Solomon Islands in search of her father, who disappeared 17 years ago on his honeymoon. The SSA accidentally comes across her, and realizes that she would make a perfect astronaut.
Based on my first impression, it looks like the creators didn't do any serious research at all. I cringed at the scene with those Titan-looking things flying in formation a few hundred feet from each other
That's only artistic license in the intro, in the actual anime, only one rocket is launched at a time. The idea of having a high school girl as an astronaut is far-fetched in real life, but other than that, this anime is mostly realistic: the Japanese space agency JAXA even assisted in its production.
*My fictional spaceport Negishima, is relatively close; it's above Indonesia/Papua New Guinea.
Although Hatsune Miku does not actually appear in this anime (it wouldn't have been possible anyway because the episodes aired before August 31, 2007), here's a nice fan art by
芸達者:
