Why Honda is suddenly launching reusable rockets
In June of this year, Honda launched and landed a prototype, 20-foot-long reusable rocket at its research facility in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island.
Though the company is known mainly as an innovative and iterative carmaker, it is also a transportation conglomerate, having developed and produced motorcycles, scooters, e-bikes, ATVs, boat motors, and even jets. Its skunkworks R&D center built the world’s first in-car navigation system, the first mass-produced automatic braking system, and the first production Level-3 autonomous driving system. Still, aiming toward the stars and potentially launching a competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX seemed to stretch beyond even Honda’s wildly diversified capabilities.
Yet according to Kazuo Sakurahara — a former director of Honda’s Formula One racing team who now runs the company’s space development strategy — it is a logical move. “Honda products have already expanded across land, sea, and sky,” Sakurahara says, from Honda’s R&D facility north of Tokyo, in his first conversation with the American press. “So, it is not surprising that space is the next field of opportunity.”
“Honda products have already expanded across land, sea, and sky.”
Honda’s stated goal for this initiative sounds a bit goofy, if phonily altruistic: “To contribute more to people’s daily lives.” But the multinational corporation also clearly sees rockets as key to its core businesses. “The rocket could be used to take satellites up to support mobility, energy, and communication,” Sakurahara says, referring to wide-area communication satellites, which are increasingly essential for the myriad connected features embedded in advanced driver assistance software, as well as a contributing factor in plans for autonomy, in all mobility products, from scooters to planes. “Though we’re more focused on transportation.”
Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of market research for the Telemetry consulting group, sees the immediate utility of such a plan. “Honda could potentially use such satellites for its own vehicles, globally. Or it could sell this capability to other manufacturers,” he says. “I could see not wanting to be reliant on a veritable monopoly like SpaceX, especially from someone who is as unstable as Elon Musk.”
Given the uncertainty introduced into long-term global geopolitical alliances by the Trump administration, and the threatening activities of Japan’s neighbors like China and North Korea, Abuelsamid sees other motivations behind Honda’s moves toward space. “These technologies could potentially provide defensive capabilities,” he says. “And they probably realized that they don’t want to be overly dependent on the US for that at this point.”
As it happens, the payload-carrying rocket is just the capsule tip of Honda’s larger plans for our solar system. Having developed fuel cell technology for over 30 years, despite failing to gain traction with it in ground vehicles, Sakurahara revealed a new application: a circulative energy system, meant to support sustainable activities in space, such as human colonies on the moon.
“I could see not wanting to be reliant on a veritable monopoly like SpaceX, especially from someone who is as unstable as Elon Musk.”
According to Sakurahara, a vertical solar array, created in partnership with Japanese company Astrobotic, will generate electricity during the two consecutive weeks of lunar daylight, electrolyzing water with a proprietary system that can produce oxygen and supply hydrogen pressurized to 10,000 psi without a compressor. The oxygen can be stored, for humans to breathe, and also combined with stockpiled hydrogen to power the fuel cells during the two weeks of consecutive lunar night. If you’re wondering where the water will come from, Sakurahara says, ice deposits at the Moon’s south pole.
Similarly, years after shuttering its 30+-year-long ASIMO android program, Honda is modifying that project with an eye toward creating human-controlled avatar robots for off-Earth use. Strong and/or dexterous, they could be utilized in tasks like module building, refueling, and even fine motor repair skills. Controls could occur in proximity on the moon, or be beamed in from earth via Honda satellites. “Space is a harsh environment, so if this works, it will be an incredibly useful robot for people, freeing users from the constraints of time, location, and physical ability,” Sakurahara says.
The reapplication of past research and development ventures, even ones that seemed like dead ends, aligns strongly with Honda’s culture of creative reuse. “While this might seem like a diversion for Honda, they’re actually building on a lot of technologies they’ve been developing for ground transportation anyway—aerodynamics, fuel cells, vehicle control systems, and robots,” Abuelsamid says. “So, it’s interesting how they can take some of that and feed it into different endeavors that are beneficial to them and to their country.”
Is Honda’s dominance of space incipient? Probably not. Sakurahara notes that the company has not yet developed or tested a full-size prototype, let alone one capable of carrying relevant payload, and isn’t certain it will commercialize the system if it does. But it’s only been six years, and Honda was able to build a concept rocket, and launch, maneuver, and land it, without it toppling or blowing up. That’s a good start.
“If you look at how long it took SpaceX from when they started to when they were able to successfully launch and return a rocket to the ground, that was more like 15 years. So I think there’s a definite possibility that by the early 2030s, Honda could be launching,” Abuelsamid says. “They’re coming at Elon in a few different ways.”After colonizing our nearest celestial neighbor, will Honda try to beat Musk to Mars? “The Moon is 380,000 kilometers away,” Sakurahara says. “Mars can be over 380 million kilometers away. I think our target for now is to make sure that we hit 500 kilometers.”
