"TANEGASHIMA, Japan-- Fifteen months after a lift-off ended in a spectacular fireball, a Japanese rocket roared off its launch pad and placed a satellite in orbit Saturday, putting Japan back in the race with rival China to become Asia's leading space power."

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-rocket27.html

Could have been bad news for us... Last friday we had a engineering run with the laser... we submit our targets to NORAD so we dont hit a satellite (If we hit one the worst we could do is blind it- maybe disorient it, I put my hand in the beam all the time and feel nothing). Our run was from sunset til 12 pm- a half nite. We had clearance from Norad on all our targets except one and it wasnt an important target... so we went on sky and did our work... About 20 minutes before midnite we got a call from NORAD asking us to stop all laser activity because Japan just launched a satellite and its position was unknown...

They said they would call back when it was 'safe' for us to use the laser- it didnt really matter since we only had 15 minutes left... but what the heck could a 13 Watt laser do to a 'weather sat'?

(There are also some other disturbing questions raised by this event, but I wont go into that...)