Well, Honda is actually a competent company.

I imagine they poached a lot of Spacex engineers by simply telling them “we won’t make you work ungodly hours, nor will we subject you to a narcissistic manchild with no engineering education dropping in on your meetings and trying to tell you how to do your job”

Since when is Honda a rocket company? This is literally the first im hearing about this. They kept this quiet for a while, and im not sure why.

Eh, it's just a start of development. It only goes 300 meters. Blue Origin goes higher, but even they aren't in orbit.

Japan also has some odd limitations on their rockets as part of their self defense only constitution. They don't build a rocket that could potentially be used to strike mainland Asia.

Well they have been making crotch rockets for a long time.

Hell yes. Any competition to musk is very much needed.

Go Honda.

It's new. Honda Space Development Division.

Honda R&D to Conduct Testing with Sierra Space and Tec-Masters on the International Space Station | Honda Global Corporate Website https://share.google/3CwIsYUh8eWsohht4

A lot of the global conglomerate Asian based companies do R&D across many fields, rather than just the product they're most know for. Toshiba makes nuclear reactors! Samsung has phones and sewing machines and microchips.... and nuclear reactors research.

Something something the first 300 meters are the hardest...

You do realize it’s Japan right? China, Japan, Korea all have work life balance issues.i wouldn’t want to work 996 or 007 lol

It's called "being hardcore"

Also, if you look at the pictures, it's not a very big rocket.

They had the same at SpaceX

The issue is not going up, it's going over. If we only cared about the private sector getting people into space, that happened on a fully reusable vehicle twenty years ago.

The problem is getting things to stay in space. Not trying to Elon-stan here, but getting a rocket into orbit is many fold more difficult than just getting into space.

I know you’re likely referring to New Shepard but Blue Origin did make it to orbit with New Glenn

Guess we doin rockets now

Not saying they don’t. Just saying the “ungodly hours” statement may not apply

I wonder how it feels when VTEC kicks in on a literal rocket

Good for them, Asia is getting their rocket programs in order while the U.S. tries their best to destroy ours. Man i wish I could move.

To be fair, they must've learned from the recent spacex accomplishments.

It seems crazy that a company that's only really known for cars, motorbikes, tuning forks, heat pumps, brake pads, pens, tractors, fertilizer, display panels, outboard motors, pneumatic systems, oil tankers, furniture, locomotives, bricks, solar panels, ATVs, generators, hot air balloons, dinghies, hydrogen fuel cells, submarines, crop dusters, jet engines, cultivators, hedge trimmers, lawnmowers, precision optics and robots would suddenly pivot to rockets.