Honda completes its first reusable rocket check in Japan and plans suborbital launches by 2029. Uncover how the corporate goals to increase into house expertise to reinforce mobility and satellite tv for pc providers.
Honda’s experimental reusable rocket lifts off throughout a profitable vertical takeoff and touchdown check on June 17, 2025, in Taiki City, Hokkaido, Japan. The check marks Honda’s first achievement in reusable rocketry and advances its spaceflight ambitions. Credit score: Honda
In a daring shift past its automotive roots, Honda has quietly entered the spaceflight enviornment, unveiling a small experimental rocket able to vertical takeoff and touchdown.
On June 17 at 4:50 p.m. native time, the prototype automobile launched from a Honda facility in Taiki City, Hokkaido, rising to round 890 toes (271.4 meters) earlier than descending to a pinpoint touchdown inside 15 inches (37 centimeters) of its goal landing level on its 56.6-second flight. In response to Honda, the corporate “achieved its supposed rocket behaviors for the launch and touchdown…whereas acquiring information throughout the ascent and descent.”
The milestone marks the primary profitable check of a reusable rocket by a Japanese firm. It additionally places Honda in uncommon firm globally, with america and China having beforehand fielded comparable vertical-landing rockets.
For Honda, the profitable check, introduced later that day in a press release, is an bold step into the house business for an organization greatest identified for environment friendly engines and precision-built autos. Honda’s historical past of unusual innovation consists of ventures just like the HondaJet, which grew to become probably the most delivered very gentle jet in 2017 — and now, it appears, house is subsequent.
Though the information shocked many, Honda started critically pursuing rocketry in 2021, when it introduced plans to develop reusable rockets together with different improvements in house, together with what the corporate calls “a circulative renewable power system on the lunar floor.” As of Tuesday, it has achieved the reusable rocket milestone. The corporate now goals to launch a suborbital automobile by 2029, although the venture stays in an early analysis part with no resolution but taken on whether or not to commercialize its rocket applied sciences.
Honda says its rocket initiative was sparked by the ambitions of younger engineers keen to use the corporate’s core applied sciences — akin to combustion programs and superior management programs — to spaceflight. The corporate sees potential not solely in satellite tv for pc providers like Earth statement but additionally in constructing out an orbital information and communications infrastructure that might improve Honda’s different companies, together with functions like self-driving autos and sustainable transport programs.
“We’re happy that Honda has made one other step ahead in our analysis on reusable rockets with this profitable completion of a launch and touchdown check,” Toshihiro Mibe, International CEO of Honda, acknowledged. “We imagine that rocket analysis is a significant endeavor that leverages Honda’s technological strengths.”
Mibe frames the rocket program as a part of a broader mission: “to proceed creating new worth which is able to make individuals’s time and place extra pleasant” — whether or not on roads, within the air, or quickly, in orbit.
