this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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This is the first I have heard they were doing this. Makes spacex accomplishments less impressive. Fuck elon
How does it make spaceX’s accomplishments less impressive? SpaceX pioneered it. Space X did it first, with a significantly bigger rocket and at a significantly higher altitude. Honda no doubt achieved this by looking at what spacex did and how they did it and copying it.
This actually makes spaceX’s accomplishments look even more impressive.
Um, no it doesn't... At all...
This is a first step landing test, not even suborbital, it flew to a height of 300 meters. This is the point that SpaceX was at in 2011 with their grasshopper rocket.
SpaceX is regularly landing orbital hardware and working on a fully reusable rocket with a greater lifting capacity than anything else ever. It's not really the same...
But fuck Elon, no argument there.
I imagine they poached a lot of Spacex engineers by simply telling them “we won’t make you work ungodly hours, nor will we subject you to a narcissistic manchild with no engineering education dropping in on your meetings and trying to tell you how to do your job”
I bet they poached 0-3 engineers.
You left out the "but you have to learn Japanese and move to Japan" part of the job pitch. That makes it a harder sell for most people.
In Japan?
"... it'll be the same, but it's a huge honor to work on this project in our company."
And we reward you for this huge honour with the worst working conditions you can imagine. You’ll live at your desk.
You do realize it’s Japan right? China, Japan, Korea all have work life balance issues.i wouldn’t want to work 996 or 007 lol
We would like to contact you for job offer in the same role as your current.
We cant pay you as much per hour but we can give you more hours to match it.
“Promise me i wont ever have to deal with Musk and i am in”
As much as it's true, not all company are doing this. There are plenty of good East Asian company with good work life balance, especially newer company that already recognize the issue.
They had the same at SpaceX
Not saying they don’t. Just saying the “ungodly hours” statement may not apply
It's called "being hardcore"
Tbf doesn’t he have a computer science degree? Which is a type of engineering degree?
Computer science is more of a math degree than anything else
Well, Honda is actually a competent company.
well Honda did this a decade later so there still is some achievement spacex has done 🤷
Hell yes. Any competition to musk is very much needed.
Go Honda.
Eh, it's just a start of development. It only goes 300 meters. Blue Origin goes higher, but even they aren't in orbit.
Japan also has some odd limitations on their rockets as part of their self defense only constitution. They don't build a rocket that could potentially be used to strike mainland Asia.
https://youtu.be/UZaIs6oSlOI
I know you’re likely referring to New Shepard but Blue Origin did make it to orbit with New Glenn
And their 1st stage is designed to be reusable, so we might have another reusable provide in the near future.
It might take a handful of launches to get there, but they are on that path.
Something something the first 300 meters are the hardest...
The Estes Corporation makes rockets that will do 600 meters.
It's great that Honda is doing this. We really need other companies in this area, because SpaceX is dominating it. Even if Elon weren't a walking disaster, we don't want one company so badly outclassing everyone else.
The issue is not going up, it's going over. If we only cared about the private sector getting people into space, that happened on a fully reusable vehicle twenty years ago.
The problem is getting things to stay in space. Not trying to Elon-stan here, but getting a rocket into orbit is many fold more difficult than just getting into space.
Yeah, if by "going over", you mean accelerating in the horizontal direction, then you're right.
Just to illustrate this: Consider we want to put 1 kg of mass into orbit.
First, we have to raise it by 100 km. That requires 1e6 J = 1 MJ of energy (formula is m*g*h).
Then, we have to accelerate it sideways, to a speed of 8 km/s. The energy to do that is 32 MJ (formula is ½*m*v²).
So, most of the energy (97%) is actually in the sideways movement.
Also, if you look at the pictures, it's not a very big rocket.
Like kei cars ....... Kei rockets???!
It's not a big American rocket.
Hey, hey, it's average.
Up and down isn't a hard problem in the grand scheme of things. It's expensive and doesn't offer much benefit which is why people generally haven't bothered.
Going up and over at orbital velocities and coming back is the hard part, and none of these new spaces companies have done that successfully yet, and SpaceX has now done it with 2 vehicles and reused them both.
New Glenn from Blue Orgin might be the first after SpaceX but it blew up coming back on their first attempt, but it's been designed to be orbital and reusable
To be fair, they must've learned from the recent spacex accomplishments.
probably
no one in the private sector was gonna take that kind of risk for a while and then SpaceX took the gamble, won and now tons of players see vertical landing of rockets works so their all looking into it.