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Honda stuns world with previously unknown reusable methane-based rocket launch in Japan, freestanding launch (no stand) and landing with extreme precision
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- Title
- Honda's hopper suddenly makes the Japanese carmaker a serious player in rocketry
- Published
- Jun 18 2025
- Word count
- 391 words
Very cool! Welcome Honda and Japan to a very exclusive club. Let's hope they can successfully scale up the vehicle.
271m is a good start towards the ISS at 400,000m away, very exiting that landing was only 0.37m from aim point. They were testing for stability and probably fuel type and the retractable fins and innumerable other things; sounds like they all succeeded. (So crazy to think about geostationary satellites at 35,800,000m)
More engineers working on options and more countries having propellants and rocket options is a good thing, too. Goodness, we're well along the new ship building race, aren't we.
Its less the altitude, and more the horizontal velocity thats constitues the bulk of the delta-v needed to get to orbit. The ISS has an orbital velocity of ~8km/s
Meaning, it's not how high up it needs to go to defeat gravity, but more of the problem that it needs to go super fast to be able to stay in orbit around the planet?
Yes. The speed is much more difficult (requires more energy/thrust) than merely getting to altitude.
Dumb question: can it like....hang out in one spot at slower speed, wait for the ISS to zip by, and lasso it like Wile E Coyote? Or from the other frame of reference, like if I have grandma stand by the rail station with a bundle and I just lean out the window to snatch it while my train rolls past?
If it's just one shipment of stuff for resupplying, the mass shouldn't slow the ISS down too much. The obvious "of course not what a dumb idea" is safety I guess.
Or! make it to ISS orbital path, leave the goodies, fall back down to earth, and have the ISS CanadARM pick it up like a Mario Kart item box lol
That idea works fine if the relative velocities are low. A train in a station is only going a few meters per second, so you could grab something without much trouble. Try to catch something with a speed difference of 8000 meters per second and you'd be lucky if it just disintegrates your grabbing arm.
I’m not a scientist, but I’d imagine one problem is that the ISS would slow down if it had to lasso packages onboard? Since it needs to speed up that mass as well (conservation and momentum, and all that), which would take a bunch of fuel.
Also not a scientist, but I'm pretty sure the reason ISS is moving as fast as it is is to avoid falling back to earth, so you can't just leave something at that height, you've got to have some velocity to "miss" the earth so to speak.
Things in orbit are going WAY too fast for that.
For something like the ISS it probably would slow it down noticeably. Were talking about a HUGE speed difference.
There is an idea called a [skyhook](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure\)) that would accomplish this though. I can't explain it so read that wiki article I linked. I'm not sure if it would ever be possible to make or not though.
Psssst you don't need to escape the parenthesis:
skyhook
[skyhook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure))Relevant xkcd (what if): https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/
I have a hard time feeling this is good, in the grand scheme of things. Space travel is so wasteful of resources. The amount of time, money, materials needed to do any of this stuff, is unmeasurable. That effort could be spent on more meaningful research, actually trying to fix what is broken on earth itself. The state of the world and the human population is just super depressing, sorry for the negativity.
Isn't that a very narrow mindset though? You're basically saying, "you can't work on A until world peace is achieved". We shouldn't want to restrict scientific and engineering advancement simply because there are other problems that need to be solved. I agree that there are a lot of problems we need to solve here on Earth. I disagree with the idea that we shouldn't focus beyond Earth until those are all solved.
To add to this, in the grand scheme of things, investments in space are small and are absolutely dwarfed by military expenditures, for example. We spend so much on the military that by just cleaning up waste, money pocketed by unnecessary middlemen, ousting cronyism in contracting, etc in the military apparatus we’d likely pay for space investments and then some.
I understand the pessimism, I do. But perhaps I can offer snippets of the Canadian Space Agency's long long list of regular earthling benefits. The gist of it is that we've had people dying for so long on earth that sometimes it takes a brand new scenario with new problems to solve to spark the idea that regular earth suffering can actually be alleviated using these new space ideas.
The link has a lot more info and examples, but I'll just copy from the improve health care section. Please do check them out.
Improving health care:
The expertise that powered Canadarm, Canadarm2 and Dextre, Canada's space robots, was used to create surgical robots such as neuroArm, a highly precise robotic arm capable of performing brain surgeries that would otherwise be impossible, and Modus V, a second-generation robotic digital microscope that helps patients with a variety of brain and spine conditions. This technology is allowing neurosurgeons to perform difficult brain surgeries with greater safety and efficiency. [...]
Systems developed to track astronauts' health from Earth, like Bio-Monitor and Bio-Analyzer, could be used for patients in remote areas. Bio-Monitor combines numerous devices into one wireless smart shirt and mobile application that measures and records data like heart rate and blood pressure so that scientists can monitor astronauts' health as they orbit the planet. Bio-Analyzer is a new tool that could quickly test samples of blood, urine, or saliva and provide results back to Earth within two to three hours. [...]
Thanks to their expertise in modelling fluid flow through rocket engines, space engineers helped design heart pumps. These pumps keep people in need of heart transplants alive by enabling blood to circulate through their body until a donor heart becomes available. [...]
Using (antigravity) g-suit technology, non-inflatable pressure garments are being used on Earth to treat women suffering from postpartum hemorrhage by applying external pressure to a woman's entire lower body to stop bleeding after childbirth. This affordable solution is saving lives around the world. [...]
Other benefits in very brief (please do read the linked articles; to quote Mr Rogers: look for the helpers)
Satellites provide data on climate change, measure pollution, and help protect our planet.
Space technologies improve products we use every day, weather forecasts, and communications worldwide.
Satellites data can be used to predict natural disasters and to support emergency relief efforts.
Space exploration is the opposite of wasteful of resources, if you set aside pork bullshit like the SLS. It's basic research - we also fund people studying microbiology and materials science and math and so on. If you took all those dollars away you could theoretically feed and house more people now, but we would stop learning about the universe, so we would never get the next discovery/invention like the polio vaccine or the zipper.
Being able to mine resources from our solar system rather than our planet will likely be a net positive for the environment and humanity.
Additionally manufacturing off of Earth, including in micro gravity / “zero” gravity has other benefits.
What's the more meaningful research you had in mind?
Slogan
Honda: like our cars, our starships don't explode.
Not sure why I'm so affectionate for Honda and Japan, but I'm excited to see this. Societal debt and social stuff among other things make me happy to see these wins
So, it's a Honda. The transportation company. I wonder how long before Honda announces rapid intercontinental space travel on a rocket that doesn't need a launch tower? Do you head out to HondaPort in NYC and strap in for your rocket trip to Tokyo HondaPort, touching down in 45 minutes vs 14 hrs on a plane? There are definitely people who would pay big dollars to skip that mind numbing flight.