In what seemed to be a development that came from nowhere, there’s a new entrant into the reusable launch systems competition – Honda. The giant Japanese industrial conglomerate recently launched a prototype reusable rocket up to 300m and landed it safely back on Earth.
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Honda’s first test launch took place on June 17th. During the test, a prototype rocket that was 6.3m tall and 85 cm in diameter, with a wet weight of 1312 kg, launched 271.4 m into the air and landed 37 cm from its nominal landing spot after a 56.6 second flight. Data was collected throughout the test to inform the next round of testing.
This step is the equivalent to the famous “Grasshopper” experiments that SpaceX completed back in 2013, where the rocket would launch, hover and return to the ground. It was a necessary step on the path to reusable rocketry, and Honda is now only the fourth company to ever complete this feat.
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SpaceX is famous for it’s work culture that is at least partly driven by fear of failure [and, a huge string of failures!], which probably won’t be the case for the Honda engineers who could simply shuffle off to other parts of the organization if their rocketry experiments fail. But, given Japan’s increasing presence in the growing space industry, it was only a matter of time before a Japanese champion would join the fray of the new RLV industry.
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Source: Honda – Yes, Honda – Tests a Reusable Rocket
Robin Edgar
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