16 ms·
Honda conducts successful launch and landing of experimental reusable rocket
- brianbreslin 1y agoIs this a precursor to a viable alternative to any of SpaceX products?
- oldpersonintx2 1y agothere are already alternatives to SpaceX products reaching an altitude of 300 meters ...but this isn't one of them, yet
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- stego-tech 1y agoNot at this stage. Looks like they used a smaller rocket to test the core concepts involved, rather than build a huge, production-ready platform like SpaceX. Good to see Japanese industry still improving their self-reliance.
- wingspar 1y agoSeems like this test is equivalent to the SpaceX Starhopper which went 150m... https://spacenews.com/spacexs-starhopper-completes-test-flight/ https://spacenews.com/spacexs-starhopper-completes-test-flig...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- EvanAnderson 1y agoI often described my wife's old Honda Civic, which we finally sold (still running and able to be driven) w/ just north of 340,000 miles, as having been to the moon and on its way back. I like the idea that someday Honda hardware could, in fact, send something to the moon.
- pkdpic 1y agoAgreed, same experience with my wife's current Honda Fit. And I like the thought experiment of Tesla Model S (or whatever) is to Falcon 9 as '98 Honda Civic is to... Wait they do they say the name if this rocket anywhere?
- EvanAnderson 1y agoThe Honda rocket won't be as "fancy" as the SpaceX but it'll have vastly better parts availability.
- randmeerkat 1y agoAnd JDM badges.
- robertlagrant 1y agoAnd magic seats
- tersers 1y agoVTEC decal on the side
- redwall_hp 1y agoHopefully anime wraps will be available as well.
- spacecadet 1y agoUS Taxpayers ain't wrong, voted most reliable rocket 10 years in a row.
- HeWhoLurksLate 1y agoI just want to know who will get the J.D. Power Initial Quality Award and then subsequently fall apart five minutes after it gets judged (lookin at you, Stellantis)
- robszumski 1y agoFor reference, Rocket Lab's Electron has a wet mass of 13,000 kg. This rocket is much smaller at 1,312 kg wet mass.
- delichon 1y agoFalcon 9 433k kg Atlas V 547k kg Starship 1,200k kg Starship Booster 3,600k kg
- glimshe 1y agoSaturn V: 2.9M kg
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Certhas 1y agok kg is a funny unit... Much more readable than Mg of course. Tonnes would also work...
- overfeed 1y agoTonne is unfortunately overloaded, the US and the UK have their own versions, but for the rest of the world is on metric, and a tonne is 1000 kg. The Falcon 9 weighing "433 t" reads way more elegantly to me.
- djaychela 1y agoFTR no-one I know (other than in old school industry about 20 years ago) used the UK 'Ton' any more. One place of work made this clear by having different pronuncication ('Tonn-ey') as they were an old-school foundry. And the spelling is different from wherever I've seen it. The nuclear industry was using metric weights fully when I did my apprenticeship in it in the late 1980s. Good job really as I think a conversion error could be catastrophic. Same goes for gallons though, US gallon is smaller than a UK one.
- whatever1 1y agoQuestion why is it so easy today to build reusable rockets? Is it because the onboard cpu speed of the chips can solve more granular control problems with low latency?
- kurthr 1y agoProof of concept. It's a lot easier to do something, if you know it can be done.
- mempko 1y agoI mean, SpaceX also knew it could be done since reusable rocket tests happened in the 90s.
- kurthr 1y agoDon't you mean the SpaceShuttle in the 80s? or Delta Clipper which didn't reach orbit? Really, what SpaceX did was radically different from the tests in the 90s from the rockets, to the controls, to the reusability goals. Otherwise they wouldn't have built Grasshopper. Now NewGlen is kinda a knockoff of Delta Clipper, but that's a different beast.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoAnd physics, nothing prevents the goal beyond execution.
- hwillis 1y agoThe DC-X was 9.1 tonnes empty and 19 tonnes full- meaning landing thrust was ~half of takeoff thrust. The Falcon 9 was 400 tonnes full and 26 tonnes empty, so takeoff thrust was >20x higher than landing thrust. That's a huge engineering difference, roughly like the difference between a car and a helicopter. The Falcon 9 was also 4x taller, meaning 16x more force to correct a lean. A little burp would send the rocket right back up in the air.
- benjiro 1y agoIts more about money. If you know that something can be done, and there is a potential market for such a project, it then becomes easier to get the funding. Chicken or the egg... One thing we also need to point out, is that SpaceX uses like 80% of their yearly launches, for their own communication / sat service. This gave a incentive for that investment. Is the same reason why, despite SpaceX throwing those things up constantly, there really is a big lag of competitors with reusable rockets. Its not that they where / not able to quickly get the same tech going. They simply have less market, vs what SpaceX does non-stop. So the investments are less, what in time means less fast development. SpaceX is a bit of a strange company, partially because they used a lot of the public funds to just throw shit at the wall, and see what sticks. This resulted in them caring less if a few rockets blew up, as long as they got the data for the next one with less flaws. It becomes harder when there is more oversight of that money, or risk averse investors. Then you really want to be sure that thing goes up and come back down into one piece from the first go. A lot of projects funding are heavily based upon the first or second try of something, and then (sometimes unwisely) funding is pulled if it was not a perfect success story.
- cududa 1y agoInitially wanted to say I’m impressed they got it on the first launch But, couldn’t specifically tell if this was indeed the first launch or not, and perhaps there were some private failures before - anyone know?
- tzury 1y agoso now any company can get its own TLD? that's cool.
- kube-system 1y agoBrand TLDs became a thing in 2012 under ICANNs New gTLD Program
- dsp 1y agoThere was an opportunity to apply over a decade ago. The plan is to open another window for applications next year.
- tzury 1y agoNow I see, there is a whole list of them out there https://icannwiki.org/New_gTLD_Brand_Applications https://icannwiki.org/New_gTLD_Brand_Applications
- 1970-01-01 1y agoI've only seen it used by companies that cannot get out of their own way. Instead of news.honda.com (their actual domain) or hondanews.com (actual domain, redirect from before, all owned by them, also has news) or honda.global (makes sense, but nothing there) or honda.com/news (makes sense, but nothing there) they go waste money on a new gTLD. So we have global.honda/en/newsroom/. . At least they're using it: https://domainmetadata.com/list-of-all-honda-domains https://domainmetadata.com/list-of-all-honda-domains
- acheron 1y agoOn one hand, it ruins DNS, but on the other hand, it makes ICANN a lot of money.
- criddell 1y agoHow does it ruin DNS?
- hinkley 1y ago
- selfselfgo 1y ago[dead]
- pwarner 1y agoIf I was Japan I'd be interested in some of the "one time use" use cases as well given the current geopolitical state of affairs.
- mrguyorama 1y agoAny reusable rocket is also an expendable rocket with slightly better payload.
- lupusreal 1y agoJAXA is pretty well set up with expendable launchers already, built by Mitsubishi. The "geopolitical" state of affairs isn't threatening their ability to put stuff into orbit, Japan doesn't rely on America/Russia/China/etc for that.
- numpad0 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3Fk3XdQFMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3Fk3XdQFMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgaGUb1GAEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgaGUb1GAEo
- walterbell 1y agoOne small step for Japan, one big step for space industry competition.
- adikulkarni11 1y agoThe most reliable rocket
- LightBug1 1y agoYay Honda ... competition! I want the NSX edition. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/v00pN4FyfuM https://www.youtube.com/shorts/v00pN4FyfuM
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- perihelions 1y agoI think there's about 5 or 6 private startups on the brink of attempting orbital booster landings within the next few months. This... is at least a decade behind that, if they're serious. Note that they don't appear to have an orbital engine yet—this thing's far too small, it has to be some kind of one-off for this demo flight. Most of the competition leaped directly to testing an engine they were developing for orbital launches, in their suborbital hops.
- wood_spirit 1y agoIt’s not clear that they need to take so long to catch up. It’s like a four minute mile. Now we’ve seen reusable rockets work, everybody builds them and nobody says it won’t work?
- nine_k 1y agoI assume this rocket is not a part of some orbital program. It's more like the SpaceX's Hopper [1], intended to test the control algorithms and such. A booster / orbital vehicle, when it appears, should have very different characteristics. I can even imagine that some kind of compatibility standard may arise, allowing to stack custom orbital vehicles to reusable boosters, much like the standardized buses for smaller satellites that exist today. [1]: https://starship-spacex.fandom.com/wiki/Starhopper https://starship-spacex.fandom.com/wiki/Starhopper
- perihelions 1y ago> "competition leaped directly to testing an engine they were developing for orbital launches" SpaceX' Starhopper was an orbital Raptor engine. The *test vehicle* wasn't orbital, but, it's testing the in-development orbital engine and associated plumbing under flight conditions (which is useful, because... well you can see the various ways Starhopper failed at the start). Likewise, Grasshopper before that, in 2012-3, was a single Merlin engine (the Falcon 9 has, eponymously, 9). SpaceX never flew a suborbital hop with anything other than an engine intended for orbital flight. I think if Honda had an orbital-class reusable engine at the hardware stage, that'd be flying that to test it as much as possible. I'm not aware of any of the competitors doing otherwise. This is signalling they don't (yet?) have one. edit: Or LandSpace, whose 10 km suborbital hop last year flew one of the methane engines their orbital vehicle has nine of.
- financypants 1y agoThose japanese rockets are much smaller compared to our big american sized rockets
- pmdulaney 1y agoEven the longest journey begins with a single step.
- throaway920181 1y agoI think they were making a dick joke.
- aerostable_slug 1y agoSpecifically a South Park reference.
- dumdedum123 1y agoExactly. People in this place. Sigh.
- tzs 1y agoOn the outside. Based on my experiences with Japanese vs American cars I'd not be surprised if they are bigger on the inside. :-) Seriously, when I bought a Civic in 1989, I looked at both the smaller Japanese cars (Civic, Sentra, Corolla) and bigger American cars. I'm tall and big and had trouble fitting comfortably in the American cars. No problem in the Japanese cars. Next time I was car shopping, sometime around 1999, I decided to take a look at SUVs which had become pretty popular by then. Again I tried the American ones. They were very large--and very cramped inside. Then I tried a Honda CR-V. It was way smaller than the American SUVs but just as with the Civic there was plenty of room. It struck me as absurd. How the heck are car companies of Japan, a country whose people average over 2" (5 cm) shorter than Americans and weigh about 2/3 what Americans weigh, so much better than American car companies at making cars that can fit tall fat Americans?
- mac3n 1y ago...looking forward to my rocket-powered Honda Fit! "you meet the nicest people on a Honda" <https://www.vintag.es/2017/09/you-meet-nicest-people-on-honda.html https://www.vintag.es/2017/09/you-meet-nicest-people-on-hond...> I don't know what kind of people you meet on that other, better-known, reusable rocket company.
- pmdulaney 1y agoCongratulations to our friends in Japan!
- jonplackett 1y agoNo-one thought to make a video of this momentous occasion?
- Electricniko 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0jjxqpC0aY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0jjxqpC0aY
- _joel 1y ago> reaching an altitude of 271.4 m I wonder if BPS .pace got further with his solid fuel thrust vectoring? Mustn't be far off that if not. https://bps.space/products/signal-r2 https://bps.space/products/signal-r2
- markedathome 1y agoUsing a Class N rocket motor, the High Steaks rocket reached about 8500m, earlier this year. I think Joe abandoned the thrust vector control for control surfaces within the fins to stabilise rotation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UX7NJLYyb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UX7NJLYyb4
- _joel 1y agoPretty certain he didn't land that one as well though :)
- 3ds 1y agoHere is the video which they should have put in the post: https://global.honda/content/dam/site/global-en/topics-new/cq_img/2025/c_2025-06-17ceng/print/c_2025-06-17c_101H.mp4 https://global.honda/content/dam/site/global-en/topics-new/c...
- djaychela 1y agoFor some reason the landing of that reminded me of the Eagle from Space:1999 - there was something different in the ballistics of it compared to SpaceX and Blue Origin. Fantastic to see, thanks for the video link.
- darrelld 1y agoI'm accustomed to seeing large plumes of chemicals coming out the other end in my minds eye when I think about rocket launches. This looks "clean" coming out the exhaust. Why is that? Is it due to the nature of chemicals it uses?
- fogh1 1y agoBasically yes, other rockets might burn chemicals that create more soot. This one seemingly doesn’t.
- nine_k 1y agoSoot means carbon-rich fuel, like RP1, and a very fuel-rich mix. Most launches I ever saw had basically zero soot, and a clean exhaust of a well-balanced fuel / oxidizer mix. Military rockets, and solid-fuel boosters like the kind the Shuttles used to use, indeed produce very visible exhaust, because they use heavy fuels, and sometimes heavier oxidizers, like nitric acid. This is because they need to be in the fueled state for a long time, ready to launch in seconds; this excludes more efficient but finicky cryogenic fuels used by large commercial rockets. The large plumes that you usually see the first few seconds when a rocket is blasting off a launch pad are mostly water vapor. The launch pad would be destroyed by the exhaust were it not cooled during the launch by large amounts of water, which gets evaporated instead of the concrete.
- ghxst 1y agoBig congratulations to the engineers! Also had no idea that .honda is a TLD that's really cool.
- throaway920181 1y agoFor anyone else that's curious, it turns out there are a TON of company-specific TLDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains#Brand_and_corporate_top-level_domains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
- toephu2 1y agoHow do you visit just the domain though? e.g., I try to visit ".ferrari" and it doesn't work in Chrome
- leesec 1y agoThis is a tiny rocket going up 300ms and coming back down. Happy for them but they're a long way from any utility ( and a decade+ behind other companies )
- throaway920181 1y agoWhich companies have this capability besides SpaceX and Blue Origin? More competition is always welcome.
- Rebelgecko 1y agoI think the DC-X program did this first in the 90s. It ran into funding issues and it turns out there isn't a ton of value in reusable rockets that only go a few hundred feet (although more advanced applications are potentially worthwhile)
- perihelions 1y agoRocket Labs, Stoke Space, Deep Blue, Landspace, Space Pioneer, iSpace, Galactic. (The last five are Chinese startups). Rocket Labs has recovered (not reflown) several orbital boosters, and the rest are within 1-2 years of orbital booster recovery attempts.
- bpodgursky 1y agoSo the correct answer is "nobody else has the capability" I'll be thrilled when someone does! Competition is great! But let's do it via technological progress, not through abuse of the english language.
- dmix 1y agoHe did say “orbital booster recovery” which is 160,000 meters. Honda reached 300 meters which is about the height of a tall skyscraper
- rasz 1y agoHere an amateur doing it all on its own https://youtu.be/SH3lR2GLgT0 https://youtu.be/SH3lR2GLgT0
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- artursapek 1y agoHonda has a TLD????
- insane_dreamer 1y agoI wouldn't have expected Honda to enter this space. Why the huge release of steam from the top of the rocket at the end? Release of heat that builds up during the descent? (Though it's not depending that fast, so it wouldn't be heat from atmospheric friction.)
- xarope 1y agosomeone mentioned it was the liquid propellant being vented: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44303132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44303132
- inemesitaffia 1y agoMitsubishi makes cars, planes and rockets. Now Honda does
- DisjointedHunt 1y agoRemember Asimo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO I'd really like to see them scale this up commercially quicker than they did with the humanoid robot they built well ahead of many others.
- atdaemon 1y agovtec kicked in!
- dangoodmanUT 1y agoHONDA???
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ricardobeat 1y agoHonda has historically invested heavily in R&D. They are robotics pioneers, have made jet skis, power tools, sell a commercial jet [1], and are responsible for the engine powering the winner (RB) of the last four F1 championships, [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_HA-420_HondaJet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_HA-420_HondaJet
- throwaway422432 1y agoAnd also the engine for the insanely dominant McLaren MP4/4.
- tzs 1y agoHonda occasionally does things that don't have any immediately obvious connection to what most people think of when they think "Honda". For example "Honda Discovers Gene Which Improves Regeneration Ability in Rice" [1]. [1] https://global.honda/en/newsroom/news/2005/c050809a-eng.html https://global.honda/en/newsroom/news/2005/c050809a-eng.html
- ndkap 1y agoFirst time I saw a domain named `honda`. On further research [1], I see that many companies have Top Level Domains of their name. Why did IANA/ICANN allow TLDs of company's names? [1]: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
- busymom0 1y agoBefore the video even launched (it took a few seconds to load while I stared at the address bar), that's exactly what I was wondering too.
- mkw5053 1y agoYears ago, I worked for Neustar [1], and they were trying to sell .<brand> domains to everyone. Looks like they finally got at least one customer. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neustar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neustar
- gertrunde 1y agoMoney mostly. $185,000 application fee to apply for a new gTLD, plus maybe some auctions for gTLDs that multiple entities wanted, resulted in just under $60 million for ICANN.[2] Apparently Google and Amazon were the most prolific appliers, with 101 and 76 applications respectively.[3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN#TLD_expansion_and_concerns_about_specific_top-level_domains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN#TLD_expansion_and_concer... [2] https://www.theregister.com/2015/04/17/icann_gltd_auction_money/ https://www.theregister.com/2015/04/17/icann_gltd_auction_mo... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#Expansion_of_gTLDs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#Expan...
- tonyhart7 1y ago60 mill is a chump change for multinational companies, but idk. people not used to type global.brand like honda did it feels weird seeing no .com at the end of it
- deleted 1y ago
- IgorPartola 1y agoI might as well ask here though this is probably a bit off topic: for smaller rockets why are catapults not used? Seems like it could save a bit on fuel and maybe even a stage.
- leoxiong 1y agoThere are companies in that space. https://www.spinlaunch.com/ https://www.spinlaunch.com/
- generalizations 1y agoShort answer: you still need a complex vehicle to finish the orbit insertion after getting thrown, and now you have the added complexity of designing your (smaller) rocket to a) survive a massive g-force while being thrown and b) fit into the catapult sling. So far the tradeoffs haven't been worth it. Basically the only things we know of that can survive our spin launch systems is stuff like 'very crushable food supplies' or 'a giant lump of steel'.
- panick21_ 1y agoSo you save a bit of fuel but you need to invest 10-100s of millions into a ground infrastructure. And then you are limited to one launch site and limited in orbits you can reach. Then you still need to design a rocket. You still need a rocket engine and all the other parts of the rocket. So even best case, you only eliminate like 60% of the cost. Now you have to completely different engineering teams with little overlap in skills. You can only build tiny rockets. In order for your accelerator not to be just completely absurd in size and cost, your gone build a rocket in the 100-200kg range. For that you can maybe ask for like 5 million $. But SpaceX is already doing that at far lower cost. And you don't even have the same flexibility of costume orbital insertions as other small launchers do. Small launchers are a bad business, of the 100s of small launch companies, the only one that has had any success is RocketLab, other then them its a graveyard. It will be hard to impossible for your rocket to be reusable. So you need to build the rocket for sub-1million $ including the launch to compete. But then ... you need specifically designed sats that can handle the acceleration. So you need costumers to specifically design their sats to a complete different standard then for your competitors. And why would any costumers do this if you significantly cheaper then your competitor. Spinlaunch has started to develop its own rocket components that they hope to get other people to use. But there are many other potentially things on a sat that could break, so for most costumers its simply not an option. The industry has been moving to larger sats, the old idea of cubesats has gone and even small sats are regularly 200kg or more. So the market for anything below is pretty tiny, and the market for sats of less then 200kg that can handle 10000g is even smaller. And the market for 200kg sats that can handle 10000g and want to go into the specific orbit that you built your catapult for, is even smaller. If there were many 100s of launches available, just desperately looking a way to get sats to a specific orbit, it might be worth a discussion. But there just isn't. This kind of technology might make sense on the moon, if you want to bulk export something like ice.
- tonyhart7 1y agoits not really high in the atmosphere but its a good start finally SpaceX got competition
- smeeger 1y agofirst time ive seen a large corporation do something that indicated they were trying to enter the market that spacex created. i imagine honda entering the race is as big a deal for space exploration as when the first starship touched down
- guicen 1y agoIt's impressive that Honda pulled this off without much fanfare. While most headlines are about Tesla or SpaceX, Honda is quietly proving that serious engineering can come from unexpected places. I’m curious if they’re planning to go beyond demos and into actual launch services.
- vucetica 1y agoI understand that your comment is related to publicity that this event got, but I chuckled when I read that Honda is an unexpected source of serious engineering :)
- Daisywh 1y agoI never thought I’d mention Honda and reusable rockets in the same sentence. But that’s exactly what makes tech exciting. When a company you didn’t expect does something bold and impressive, it changes how you see the whole field. Honda’s long history of quiet, precise engineering might be just what space exploration needs more of right now.
- RataNova 1y agoSometimes it's the unexpected players who bring fresh perspectives
- be87581d 1y ago[dead]
- methuselah_in 1y agoI guess its healthy for the competition to exist. There will be more innovation moving forward. For Japanese it was long due.
- RataNova 1y agoMore players = more ideas, more pressure to improve
- methuselah_in 1y agoWell isn't it good for innovation.
- RataNova 1y agoI guess when you have decades of combustion, control, and automation know-how, this isn't such a stretch. Curious to see if they'll seriously push toward suborbital launches by 2029
- romain_batlle 1y agoThey might be able to replace their F1 electric engine part for 2026 with a jet engine. it will prevent it from not working in the middle of the straight.
- JoeAltmaier 1y agoIn a mature space launch economy, there is room for every combination of cost and capacity and timing (launch frequency). Like scooters and taxis and truck and trains and cargo ships, each has its place. Don't imagine because this rocket is a certain size or lift capacity, that it isn't serious. And, this was just an R&D technology test. Who knows where they'll go from here.
- ItCouldBeWorse 1y agoAh, the pioneer effect in full effect- as in - once its proven it can be done, many will do it, finding ever more surprising efficient solutions. And the irony is - sometimes, the guys who are the first - don't even know they are the first. The other team just has some marketing guy, lying through his teeth about the "progress" they have and what they can do. And some manager falls for that- and press-gangs some real engineers to "just-do-that-thing" - and suddenly you are all standalone USP without ever planing for it. Happened to the unreal team, who created the z-buffer reflections in the marble floor- because some other "engine" from around the world "could do that" - which ironically was a rendered non-real time image. To sum it up nicely the real innovators, are marketing gurus, lying with "pretend proof" forcing the competition to adapt. Thank you for coming to my TED-walk
- trueismywork 1y agoNot many, Europe wont do it.
- adr1an 1y agoDo you care to expand as to why you believe that's true?
- ItCouldBeWorse 1y agoBecause agile project management approaches ala space x, can not easily be copied by waterfall bureaucracies ala europe? Ariane was feature freeze in 2016 - and space X reached reliable Falcon 9 reuse-ability in 2017. For the tortoise of europe - the hare just went by - and suddenly all the grass is gone and hares are everywhere. The idea that software-culture, could subvert and easily out-compete the old aristocracy culture of hardware production (like cars) must feel terrifying for the dinosaurs who relied on that to feed them.
- trueismywork 1y agoYou're being down voted hut you're actually correct. Very good reason.
- andrewflnr 1y ago[flagged]
- b112 1y ago[flagged]
- andrewflnr 1y ago[flagged]
- b112 1y ago[flagged]
- computerthings 1y ago[dead]