“A landing at the near 37 cm: surprise, the Japanese car giant posed a rocket like SpaceX, but without making it a whole circus
The prototype reusable rocket, developed in all discretion by Honda, posed with a precision of 37 cm after a flight of 56.6 seconds. © Honda
In Taiki, a small remote corner of Hokkaidō, Honda has just demonstrated that space is no longer reserved for giants in the sector, as Blue Origin,, SpacexOr Chinese Space Epoch. The Japanese manufacturer, better known for its Civic and its VTEC engines, launched and posed a reusable rocket prototype with surgical precision. A short but ambitious test, which discreetly places Honda in the list of future private space players.
Honda succeeds in the test of its reusable rocket: controlled flight, landing in the centimeter
The flight lasted only 56.6 seconds … but it was enough in Honda to show that he already masters the essential: to take off a launcher, stabilize it in flight, then put it precisely vertically, on his own legs. This experimental demonstrator, 6.5 meters high for a take -off weight of 1,270 kg, reached an altitude of 271 meters before descending to land at only 37 centimeters from the planned contact point.
Thanks to this successful test, Honda obtained the behaviors provided for the launch and landing of the rocket (reaching an altitude of 271.4 meters, and landing 37 centimeters from the referred point point, for a volume of flight of 56.6 seconds), while collecting data during the climb and the descent.
Powered by a liquid fuel-fuel engine, this rocket is a concentrate of the know-how accumulated by Honda in robotics, on-board control and autonomous vehicles. The company specifies relying on technical bricks from its R&D Automobile department: stabilization algorithms, inertial sensors, software redundancy … so many elements already experienced on roads, now transposed into vertical flight.
The test took place in the space center that Honda has been developing for several years in Taiki, in collaboration with Jaxa, the Japanese space agency. This site, dedicated to suborbital experiments, is gradually becoming a Japanese mini-cap.
Essay carried out in the city of Taiki, in Hokkaidō, in Japan (photo taken in May 2025) © Honda
Honda is still discreet about the future. The next step targeted? A suborbital flight by 2029, that is to say crossing the 100 km altitude without reaching orbit. This would make it possible to validate atmospheric back-to-school and high-precision guidance technologies, while exploring the possibility of launching micro-satellites in the long term.
This test represented the first launch and landing trial led by Honda, aimed at demonstrating key technologies essential to the reusability of a rocket, such as stability in flight to climb and descent, as well as the landing capacity.
Officially, the phase is still “fundamental”. But in fact, Honda is now the only car manufacturer to have designed, tested and posed a reusable rocket. One way to remember that space, tomorrow, will also be a matter of mobility.
Although the research on Honda rockets is still in the fundamental phase, and no decision has been made concerning the marketing of these technologies, Honda will continue its progress with the aim of developing a technological capacity allowing a suborbital flight by 2029.
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