Suddenly, Japan's awareness of its space program has come alive after decades during which, for the most part, the Japanese paid little attention to their country's exploration plans or even realized they had one. Japanese astronauts, usually piggybacking onto other nations' missions into space, are normally good for a day or so of newspaper stories and perhaps a goodwill visit to some schoolchildren. But that all came to a flaming end earlier this month when the space probe Hayabusa streaked across the sky over Western Australia, safely jettisoning its payload for scientists to examine after a seven-year space voyage to a tiny pinprick of an asteroid, Itokawa, 300 million kilometers from earth – and back.