Honda launched and landed a prototype, 20-foot reusable rocket in June at a research facility in Hokkaido. The company operates as a diversified transportation manufacturer that produces motorcycles, scooters, e-bikes, ATVs, boat motors, and aircraft. Honda's skunkworks R&D created the first in-car navigation, the first mass-produced automatic braking system, and the first production Level-3 autonomous driving system. Honda appears to be expanding into orbital or suborbital launch capabilities. Kazuo Sakurahara, a former Formula One racing team director who now leads space development strategy, frames space as a logical extension of Honda products across land, sea, and sky.
"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.""
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