Here is the video which they should have put in the post:
https://global.honda/content/dam/site/global-en/topics-new/c...
https://global.honda/content/dam/site/global-en/topics-new/c...
But it also illustrates that I've seen in the Bay Area time and time again, which is that once you demonstrate that something is doable (as SpaceX has) It opens the way for other capital to create competitive systems.
At Google, where I worked for a few years, it was interesting to see how Google's understanding of search (publicly disclosed), and the infrastructure to host it (kept secret) kept it comfortably ahead of competitors until the design space was exhausted. At which point Google stopped moving forward and everyone else asymptotically approached their level of understanding and mastery.
I see the same thing happening to SpaceX. As other firms master the art of the reusable booster, SpaceX's grasp on the launch services market weakens. Just as Google's grasp of the search market weakens. Or Sun's grasp of the server market weakened. When it becomes possible to buy launch services from another vendor which are comparable (not necessarily cheaper, just comparable) without the baggage of the damage Elon has done, SpaceX will be in a tougher spot.
It also helps me to understand just how much SpaceX needs Starship in order to stay on top of the market.
Some folks will no doubt see this as casting shade on SpaceX, I assure you it is not. What SpaceX's engineering teams have accomplished remains amazing and they deserve their success. It is just someone who has been through a number of technology curves noting how similar the they play out over their lifetimes.
Having witnessed first hand how DEC felt that Sun's "toy computers" would never eclipse DEC in the Server business, and watched as United Launch Alliance dismissed Falcon 9 as something that would never seriously challenge their capabilities, it feels almost prophetic to watch SpaceX's competitors emerge.
I also won't forget the marketing department at the camera company I worked at, dismissing the iPhone, when it first came out (it ended up eating their lunch).
RIM got so completely smoked with their ten year development cycles. It’s amazing if that they still have a business today to be honest.
There's also an entertaining movie based on this book, a rare business film that is more about failure than success.
At the time, data was mondo expensive. Everyone was stuck low-bandwidth. Then when the iphone launched, Jobs + Apple did an exclusive with Cingular/AT&T. The talk at the time, was it was a bidding war -- they all wanted the iphone on their network first.
That exclusive opened the door to a phone manufacturer, for the first time, negotiating bandwidth, new data plans and more. RIM didn't have a lot of software that was high bandwidth, because the carriers wouldn't even allow it before Apple broke that hold.
So suddenly here's this new phone, with an exclusive, and with actual usable web browsing with a usable data plan price.... and RIM still begging for that.
(Obviously RIM still could have caught up if they didn't drop the ball, but this was a big shift in the market)
They are so far ahead even their biggest competitor can’t comprehend what they’re doing.
The list is longer than that! The earliest hop was probably by McDonnell Douglas in 1993 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_QQDY7PYc8
Deep Blue, several km, hard landing — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-g26Zt15lo
iSpace, 0.3 km — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKCH9ElmmZA
CASC, 12 km — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55iVjGuf_sE (their 75 km attempt in January failed, and doesn't have a public video)
Space Epoch, 2.5 km, hard landing — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTQK1kDpbw4
And something that went orbital at supersonic speed
Is not even remotely the same universe
McDonell Douglas have done up and down since 1992
SpaceX is the only entity that have recovered and reused any rocket parts after sending payloads orbital
Wake me up when someone have done even a test that resembles orbital recovery
Until then all the EDS in here has zero power over reality
This is not true. Say what you will about the Shuttle, but they definitely recovered and reused rocket parts from both the boosters and the orbiter.
This is the "markets mature and commodify over time" thing.
What companies are supposed to do in those cases are one of two things. One, keep investing the money into the market or related ones so you keep having an advantage. Or two, if there is nothing relevant and adjacent to productively invest in, return it to shareholders as dividends or share buybacks so they can invest it in some other unrelated market.
But space seems like it would be the first one big time because of the amount of stuff that still has yet to be developed. Starlink was an obvious example of something in that nature, and then it's going to be things like "put datacenters in orbit so you can use solar without worrying about clouds or nighttime" and "build robots that can do semi-autonomous work in places far enough away for both human presence and round trip latency to be an inconvenience" etc.
We'd be living in Star Trek by the time they'd run out of something more to do.
Chances are that we will be living on the consequence of the end of fossil fuels and the rise of climate change long before that, though.
Not remotely the worst case. How do you expect to power all the ships needed for globalisation with nuclear power? What about planes? Can a rocket take off with a nuclear engine?
Fossil fuels account for 80% of the energy we use, electricity merely 20%. A whole lot of those 80% come from use-cases that were built around fossil fuels (how do you make plastic and all the materials that depend on it with nuclear energy?), and we don't (yet) have a way to replace that with something else. Try to power a ship with electricity...
Hydrogen, you say? We would need a lot more energy to produce enough hydrogen to replace oil. So we're going from "we don't have a way to compensate for the lack of oil" with "our solution is to not only compensate, but actually produce more energy than what oil was giving us".
All that while currently living a mass extinction and having already missed the reasonable objectives for global warming. So we have a few decades to get there, and what we have seen in the last few decades is that all we have achieved is making the problem worse.
If you have enough electricity, you can manufacture avgas, methane and whatever other fuels you need for aerospace.
What's the ratio of nuclear-powered big ships vs non-nuclear-powered big ships?
> If you have enough electricity
We're talking about moving our current electricity production entirely out of fossil fuels (because we produce a lot of electricity with them), then multiplying that production by 5, and at this point we're only producing the same amount of energy as today. But of course that's not enough, because we then need to use a lot of that energy to produce what's needed to replace oil, e.g. hydrogen.
We currently need what... 10-15 years to build a nuclear power plant? We're talking about building multiple orders of magnitudes more of them in a few decades, together with the electrical network and of course everything that needs to be re-engineered now that they can't run with oil anymore. And we're currently using oil for a reason: it's super dense, there is nothing more convenient.
And what value does it add? Nothing. It's just for replacing what currently works. Who will pay for that? Where will the money come from?
And this has to be done in a context where geopolitical instability will grow every year (because it is a fact: our access to abundant fossil fuel is coming to an end; Europe has seen it since 2007). And of course in a context where we are not remotely thinking about doing it. In the last decades, we as a society have actually kept accelerating in the opposite direction.
How realistic do you think your scenario is, really?
Part of this is we don't build a lot of them and so are not good at it. If we set out to build hundreds of them per year we could do that, and costs would go down.
>And what value does it add? Nothing. It's just for replacing what currently works. Who will pay for that? Where will the money come from?
That is not an issue. A quick search says that ships have a lifetime to 20-30 years after which they are replaced. Sure there are a few antiques older than that, but for the vast majority of ships the owner will pay to replace it in 20-30 years anyway. Oil is not going to run out on a single day, it will be a process of years which is plenty of time for normal processes to work.
I don't favor nuclear in general, but for large ships it remains the only thing I know of that makes sense. (synthetic fuels are expensive, and solar/wind needs more space than a ship to deliver the power a ship wants).
How do you get from "it takes 10 years now" to "it takes less than a year now if we really want it"?
Also you need qualified people to build that, it's not like you can vibe code it.
Again, peak oil in Europe was 2007, in the world it was currently 2018, it's not like we have 100 years to solve our energy problem. And I'm not talking about climate yet.
>peak oil in Europe was 2007
Europe is still using a lot of oil in 2025! They didn't have to change overnight, it is a long term process.
But that is very far from being a goal! Every year we emit more CO2, even though we already start seeing the effects of climate change (it's only beginning), but we keep accelerating in the wrong direction.
> Europe is still using a lot of oil in 2025!
That's not what I said. First, Europe imports pretty much the totality of their fossil fuels. And second, the European economy has been slowing down since 2007. The US likes to say "we have a better economy because we work more and better", but actually it seems pretty reasonable to think that it may be related to access to fossil fuels.
We have to find a replacement for oil and get it to the scale of oil in a fraction of the time we had to get where we are now with oil. And getting there with oil was easier, because oil is extremely convenient.
It's a bit like saying "we need to rewrite the Linux kernel with a new language that we are yet to invent, and it has to reach feature-parity in 5 years". Sure, theoretically we know how to create a new language and how to write a kernel, but can we do both in 5 years? Ever heard of e.g. Fuchsia? And they didn't try to invent a language for it.
We also know from experience that synthetic fuels are around 5 times more expensive than oil, and so only niches are willing to pay for it if oil is an alternative.
Data centers in space are a pipedream until we have a material-science breakthrough: radiating heat into space is too inefficient at rack-scale, let alone DCs.
The challenge with orbital booster reuse is getting them threw the atmosphere intact and ready to land and then be reused quickly. And do that while being optimized enough to carry payload. That is the actual challenge. And that's just the first, then you need to build everything to be able to do this 5-10 times.
Only one other company then SpaceX has achieved getting a booster back at all, and that was by dropping it into an ocean. RocketLab, and they so far as I know have never reflown a complete booster. BlueOrigin has never landed a complete booster. ULA and Arianespace aren't close.
Honda in particular is not a launch competitor and is very unlikely to be one in the future. Japan already has a pet rocket that they support that has low launch rates. Honda isn't just isn't a competitor in the launch sector, and I don't think they are even planning that.
BlueOrigin might emerge as a competitor, but its nothing like Sun (sun was profitable in the first year). BlueOrigin simply has an infinite money glitch, that almost no other company in history had. The amount of money BlueOrigin spent in the last 10 year is actually unbelievable, they at times had the same amount of people as SpaceX, while having near 0 revenue. By any rational evaluation BlueOrigin is completely non-viable as a company, any they are burning billions per year.
RocketLab will likely be a real competitor eventually, but they are pretty clearly positioning themselves at being Nr.2, not aiming for flight rates nearly in SpaceX territory. And they have a lot of technical risk left to clear.
At the moment SpaceX is moving forward faster then anybody else is catching up. Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy still run loops around everybody and nobody will challenge it for another 10 years at least, and that's assuming Falcon 9 operations don't improve.
Starship isn't needed for the launch market, but for their own constellation.
I think the timeline is very difficult to predict here. We've seen countless companies who are leading in technologies who when others see it can be done... -know- it can be done so then can do it. Like the 4 minute mile.
I know it's not simple and no-one else is near SpaceX at the moment, but to ignore reusability has become an extinction-level event for launch providers. Some will learn from the 'break it and learn quickly' mentality that SpaceX followed for getting F9 to reliable reusability and there will be more competition.
Second-stage re-use is clearly the next phase and that's what Starship is targeting (plus massive capacity). I don't know if it scales to smaller rockets, but if it does (and we know that it's physically possible as some of the Starship second-stages have made it back kinda-alive), then it will be revolutionary.
Look at the lead that Tesla has thrown away in the EV market. I remember seeing an interview with Elon Musk talking about BYD EVs - "Yes, but look at their car, it's a joke"... to now having better tech in some ways than Tesla, and an up-to-date product line which looks way better than the staid models that Tesla is producing. Only the charging infra is keeping them ahead in terms of overall usability - and at some point that will be a solved problem for disparate third-party charging providers.
Cybertruck is a child-like anomaly which is not a mass seller. The M3 and MY are dated, and the robotaxi is merely a rehash of those stylistically (as well as completely the wrong thing to be making in terms of the market it's supposed to serve, IMO). I have read that Tesla is stuck in a rut, and their line-up looks like it. The 'highland' refresh and model y are both sticking-plaster makeovers.
When I ask my (mid 20s) kids if they'd buy a Kia EV3, a BYD Dolphin Surf or a Tesla, it's the Kia or the BYD. They look like cool cars, not something that a 50 year old (me!) would like (I prefer the EV3 if I had a choice). I know this is a bit off topic, but I'm just trying to illustrate that it's easy to think you're unassailable, and then the competition not only catches up, but overtakes. And timelines are impossible to predict to that scale, IMO.
But it hasn't, that's just a fact. Neither ULA, nor Arianespace, nor Russia have gone extinct or embraced reuse to any degree at all. Same goes for India and Japan. Because this market simply doesn't operate like typical markets.
ULA and Arianespace have lots of orders. There a complex reason for this, but its still just a reality. Neither Russia or India have made major investments in reusable rockets. China to some degree does but we have little insight.
The only competitors are all new companies that had no position in the market before.
> Like the 4 minute mile.
No amount of believe makes it just happen. You can't just work a bit harder and get there incrementally. That's not how rockets work. Its not like running at all. Runners already existed, they just needed to incrementally improve a little bit, believe can help with that.
But if you don't have the necessary rocket engine or architecture, you can't just incrementally improve to get to the goal. You need to redo the whole architecture from the ground up. No amount of testing and believe turns Ariane 5 into a Falcon 9 competitor. And that's going to cost billions even if everything goes well.
That's why non of the existing competitors have done it. Its new potential competitors coming up that work on it.
> Some will learn from the 'break it and learn quickly' mentality that SpaceX followed for getting F9 to reliable reusability and there will be more competition.
That mentality is almost 20 years old and nobody has embraced it in the same way. There are many reasons for this that I could get into. But its far more then simply a shift in mentality. If your fundamentals are wrong, no amount of mentality shift changes anything.
And even if you embrace that mentality, its still a 10 year journey, see Stoke Space for example.
And many companies that had that mentality have gone bust, see ABL and others.
> Look at the lead that Tesla has thrown away in the EV market.
Tesla lead wasn't really technological. They never had battery technology better then what many other companies can produce. Except maybe their packs, were a bit better in the beginning, but that's about it and that wasn't a huge engineering lift to replicate.
What made them get a lead is the complete believe in the concept, and their ability to raise enough money to make it happen on a large scale, plus proving there is demand.
Also I think drawing parallels between car industry and space industry isn't really relevant at all.
But all national launch providers use to supplement their income with commercial launches and SpaceX has completely sucked the air out of the room in that regard. It’s now more expensive for all these countries to keep these programs operational.
>once you demonstrate that something is doable (as SpaceX has) It opens the way for other capital to create competitive systems.
>buy launch services from another vendor... without the baggage of the damage Elon has done
Can anyone point to a single launch contract cancelled because of "baggage?" Big media would no doubt gleefully shout that story from the hilltops, but I haven't seen it.
>it feels almost prophetic to watch SpaceX's competitors emerge.
All Goliaths eventually fall, but they have an annoying tendency of not doing so on the timelines we might hope for. Just look at Microsoft in the 90s.
Honda is still in the jet industry, despite joining late. The Honda Jet was a fresh take on what small jet design. Moving into new, adjacent markets is their schtick. Motorcycles -> passenger vehicles -> jets -> rockets
"The smart cow problem is the idea that a technically difficult task may only need to be solved once, by one person, for less technically proficient group members to accomplish the task using an easily repeatable method. "
https://thegaijinghost.com/blog/japan-life-sized-gundam-thro...
But an impressively smooth landing regardless, and I would imagine maybe harder the smaller the rocket is.
From another article.
A record height for a giraffe in a UK zoo was 5.8 m, but the tip of his horns was said to have reached close to 6.1 m.
So 6 m is about in this ballpark.
Or are there really SUVs which are > 6m in length?
You likely weren't being exhaustive in your listing, but I first started watching aerospace development with Armadillo Aerospace, and some of their rockets were much smaller. Their largest one was still shorter than the dc-x.
Its dimensions according to Wikipedia:
Height – 31 feet (9.54 meters)
Weight – 2.9 tons (2.6 metric tons)
Diameter – 20 inches (52 centimeters)
Payload to Low-Earth Orbit – ~9 lbs (4 kg)
Pretty sure that, or some other hobbyist project, is going to take the prize for "smallest".
I doubt that this rocket has an engine intended for orbit? So it makes me wonder how serious this program is.
Why is that? Is it due to the nature of chemicals it uses?
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.
Solid boosters put out the most visible exhaust, as burning APCP[1] emits solid particles of metal oxides. Also some rockets (mostly Russian, Chinese, and Indian) use unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine + dinitrogen tetroxide, which emits a reddish-orange exhaust. Both compounds are toxic, as is the exhaust.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_perchlorate_composite...
Ethanol/oxygen is my guess. Blue, and also very little soot.
It's hard to say for sure, but I lean towards Honda's rocket using hydrogen. Honda has experience with it. They use hydrogen in their fuel cell vehicles, and their press release from 2021 mentions using hydrogen for rockets.[1]
I'm pretty sure both fuel and oxidizer are cryogenic, because when the rocket lands it vents from several areas (most likely separate tanks). That would rule out ethanol or methanol as the fuel.
I don't see any secondary exhaust from a gas generator, and staged combustion would be something to brag about (and much higher thrust), so my guess is that it's an expander cycle. Expander cycle engines require a fuel that boils easily, so it would have to be fueled by propane, methane, or hydrogen. I don't think it's propane, as the only propane/lox rocket I've seen has orange exhaust.[2] If Honda poached some engineers from Mitsubishi, I could see them going with a hydrolox expander cycle, as that's what the H family of rockets use.
The only thing that doesn't line up with hydrogen is the low thrust given the propellant consumption. Based on the claimed wet/dry mass (1,312kg/900kg), they used at most 412kg of propellant. Flight duration was 56.6 seconds, so that's an average of 7.28kg of propellant per second. If the stated wet/dry mass is correct and the rocket used up all of its fuel, then the rocket's thrust was around 13kN at the start and around 7kN near the end. Let's say it averaged 10kN. Force equals mass flow rate times exhaust velocity. So 10kN divided by 7.28kg/sec is 1.374 km/s. Divide by standard Earth gravity and you get 140 seconds, which is pathetic for a rocket. It could be that they only used a small fraction of the available propellant, or they had a poor nozzle design, or the engine was throttled very low and was therefore less efficient. If we assume the test flight only used 40% of the available propellant, then we'd get a flow rate of 2.9kg/sec and a specific impulse of 352 seconds. But that sort of assumption can be used to come up with any Isp.
Still, I think it's using either hydrogen or methane as fuel. Nothing else fits with the video.
1. https://global.honda/en/newsroom/news/2021/c210930beng.html
2. Here's a video of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket, which uses propane/lox: https://x.com/isaraerospace/status/1906418985173758236
It could simply be pressure-fed. No turbopump at all—just a helium tank.
You have a preference for assuming sophistication, but this is a one-off inexpensive test article with trivial performance needs. My guess is that they'd made the simplest engineering choices possible at every turn.
I wonder if that's the optimal design for VTOL rocket landers? Or is that more particular to smaller lighter rockets and eventually you need heavier duty options for bigger rockets?
Also the DC-X was eventually intended to be single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO). Do any of these reusable rockets plan on being SSTO? Whether from Space-X/Blue Origin or this or the Chinese ones? SSTO is where you're going to dramatically change the economics of rockets, as you now only have to worry about refueling when launching satellites, instead of using an expendable second stage..
[edit] the camera angle and the camera height from the ground is different as well between the lift off and landing.
It makes more sense than someone going out and grabbing them during the short flight. Those things would need to be sturdy and attached to not melt or blow away during the launch, and they would be hot.
edit: If you open up the first image on the submission and look to the left of the crane, you can see what look like the risers. They do seem to come out of the ground. You can see the same trees as the landing shot.
edit: I didn't realize the page had more videos under the Download button. I was wrong about the rectangles, but you can definitely see it's landing in a different spot in the onboard video (#3). You can still see the risers when it lands.
Someone must have run out and grabbed the risers.
Nope.
https://global.honda/en/topics/2025/c_2025-06-17ceng/image_d...
Video three and four clearly show it lands a little bit away from the risers. Same pad, but only 1/2 comments--not mine--suggested it was a different pad.
The surrounding features are a match.
> Honda専用 再使用型ロケット実験設備
> Honda dedicated reusable rocket experiment facility
yup
[0] https://www.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:73...
If you look at the landing shot, you can see that towards the corner are some markings for previous risers which were used for previous launches (or markings for future risers for future launches). The risers it launched from this time are just in a different corner.
Also, I believe it would have been a historical moment if they filmed the entire staff watching the event from the control room.
For the first real hop see Xombie circa 2010.