TOKYO (AP) — Japan's space agency successfully launched Sunday its most powerful flagship H3 rocket, carrying a newly developed unmanned cargo spacecraft for its first mission to deliver supplies to the International Space Station.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said the HTV-X1 spacecraft successfully lifted off atop the No. 7 H3 rocket from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center in the country's south and confirmed it entered targeted orbit 14 minutes after liftoff.
The spacecraft was separated and placed into a planned orbit, JAXA said. If everything goes smoothly, it is expected to arrive at the ISS in a few days to deliver supplies. Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, currently at the ISS, is set to catch the craft with a robot arm in the early hours of Thursday.
The HTV-X is the successor to JAXA’s unmanned H-II Transfer Vehicle, known as Kounotori, or stork in Japanese, which flew nine missions to the ISS between 2009 and 2020.
The new freighter can carry a bigger payload and supply power during flight, enabling the transport of lab samples that require storage at low temperatures.
The HTV-X is designed to be connected to the ISS for up to six months to deliver supplies and retrieve waste from the ISS, then conduct technical missions while making an orbital flight after leaving the station, this time for three months.
Sunday’s launch also marks a successful debut for H3 rocket’s most powerful version, with four rocket boosters and a bigger fairing, a top compartment for payloads, officials said.
JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa called Sunday's launch “a major step forward” that demonstrated Japan's capability of delivering supplies to space, which serves as “the basis of autonomous space activity.”
Iwao Igarashi, head of the Space Business Department at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, responsible for developing H3 with JAXA and operating rocket launches, said Japan's track record of on-time launch and accuracy in delivering payloads and the newly modified rocket prove they can accommodate a range of customer needs. He said his company plans to expand its launch facility.
H3 rocket replaces Japan's long-beloved mainstay H-2A rocket, which made its final flight in June, as a new flagship model designed to be more cost-competitive in the global space market. The H3 has so far made six consecutive successful flights after a failed debut attempt in 2023, when the rocket had to be destroyed with its payload.
Japan sees a stable, commercially competitive space transport capability as key to its space program and national security.
The H3 (7th) rocket by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), carrying a new HTV-X cargo transfer spacecraft, is launched from the Tanegashima Space Center in Minamitane, Tanegashima island, southern Japan, Sunday, Oct. 26, 2025. (Kotaro Ueda/Kyodo News via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is casting doubt on President Donald Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship in a consequential case that was magnified by Trump’s unparalleled presence in the courtroom.
Conservative and liberal justices on Wednesday questioned whether Trump's order declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens comports with either the Constitution or federal law.
Trump, the first sitting president to attend arguments at the nation’s highest court, spent just over an hour inside the courtroom for arguments made by the Republican administration's top Supreme Court lawyer, Solicitor General D. John Sauer. The president departed shortly after lawyer Cecillia Wang began her presentation in defense of broad birthright citizenship.
Trump heard Sauer face one skeptical question after another. Justices asked about the legal basis for the order and voiced more practical concerns.
“Is this happening in the delivery room?” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked, drilling down into the logistics of how the government would actually figure out who’s entitled to citizenship and who’s not.
Justice Clarence Thomas sounded the most likely among the nine justices to side with Trump.
“How much of the debates around the 14th Amendment had anything to do with immigration?” Thomas asked, pointing out that the purpose of the amendment was to grant citizenship to Black people, including freed slaves.
The justices are hearing Trump’s appeal of a lower-court ruling from New Hampshire that struck down the citizenship restrictions, one of several courts that have blocked them. They have not taken effect anywhere in the country.
The case frames another test of Trump's assertions of executive power that defy long-standing precedent for a court that has largely ruled in the president's favor — but with some notable exceptions that Trump has responded to with starkly personal criticisms of the justices. A definitive ruling is expected by early summer.
The birthright citizenship order, which Trump signed the first day of his second term, is part of his Republican administration’s broad immigration crackdown.
Birthright citizenship is the first Trump immigration-related policy to reach the court for a final ruling. The justices previously struck down global tariffs Trump had imposed under an emergency powers law that had never been used that way.
Trump reacted furiously to the late February tariffs decision, saying he was ashamed of the justices who ruled against him and calling them unpatriotic.
He issued a preemptive broadside against the court on Sunday on his Truth Social platform. “Birthright Citizenship is not about rich people from China, and the rest of the World, who want their children, and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America. It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES!,” the president wrote. “Dumb Judges and Justices will not a great Country make!”
Trump's order would upend the long-standing view that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, and federal law since 1940 confer citizenship on everyone born on American soil, with narrow exceptions for the children of foreign diplomats and those born to a foreign occupying force.
The 14th Amendment was intended to ensure that Black people, including former slaves, had citizenship, though the Citizenship Clause is written more broadly. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” it reads.
In a series of decisions, lower courts have struck down the executive order as illegal, or likely so, under the Constitution and federal law. The decisions have invoked the high court's 1898 ruling in Wong Kim Ark, which held that the U.S.-born child of Chinese nationals was a citizen.
The Trump administration argues that the common view of citizenship is wrong, asserting that children of noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore are not entitled to citizenship.
The court should use the case to set straight “long-enduring misconceptions about the Constitution’s meaning,” wrote Sauer, the solicitor general.
No court has accepted that argument, and lawyers for pregnant women whose children would be affected by the order said the Supreme Court should not be the first to do so.
“We have the president of the United States trying to radically reinterpret the definition of American citizenship,” said Cecillia Wang, the American Civil Liberties Union legal director who is facing off against Sauer at the Supreme Court.
More than one-quarter of a million babies born in the U.S. each year would be affected by the executive order, according to research by the Migration Policy Institute and Pennsylvania State University’s Population Research Institute.
While Trump has largely focused on illegal immigration in his rhetoric and actions, the birthright restrictions also would apply to people who are legally in the United States, including students and applicants for green cards, or permanent resident status.
Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.
Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.
Pro and anti-Trump demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court, before justices hear oral arguments on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
President Donald Trump leaves the U.S. Supreme Court, Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
President Donald Trump's motorcade arrives at the U.S. Supreme Court, Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)
Pro and anti-Trump demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court, before justices hear oral arguments on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
President Donald Trump's motorcade arrives at the U.S. Supreme Court, Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)
Demonstrators holding opposing views verbally engage ahead of President Donald Trump's arrival at the U.S. Supreme Court, Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)
President Donald Trump's limo exits the White House en route to the Supreme Court, Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
President Donald Trump's motorcade arrives at the U.S. Supreme Court, Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)
Pro and anti-Trump demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court, before justices hear oral arguments on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
People arrive to walk inside the U.S. Supreme Court, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. The Supreme Court justices will hear oral arguments today on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
People arrive to walk inside the U.S. Supreme Court, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. The Supreme Court justices will hear oral arguments today on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
President Donald Trump answers questions from reporters after signing an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House Tuesday, March 31, 2026, in Washington, as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick listens. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The U.S. Supreme Court is seen as the moon rises Tuesday, March 31, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
