Toyota Enters the Space Game With $44 Million Rocket Investment

Popular car company Toyota just doesn’t want to stick to the road anymore. Instead, the automaker is looking upward to the final frontier, investing in rockets as the next mode of transportation.

Woven by Toyota, a subsidiary of the company, is investing about $44.4 million (7 billion yen) in Japanese space startup Interstellar Technology as a way to enter the growing space industry, Interstellar. announcement this week

“We’re also exploring rockets, because the future of mobility shouldn’t be limited to just Earth or just one car company,” Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda said Monday during a presentation at CES in Las Vegas, CNBC reported. Report. The “car company” Toyota is referring to could be Tesla, whose founder Elon Musk is in the rocket business through space industry darling SpaceX.

The partnership between Toyota and Interstellar aims to help the rocket startup scale its production to meet growing demand in the satellite launch industry by supplying more launch vehicles. “Oven is the ideal partner to help evolve our rocket production from one-off production to a scalable supply chain, bringing to life our ‘future where everyone can access space,'” Interstellar CEO Takahiro Inagawa said in a statement.

In 2017, Interstellar became Japan’s first private company to launch a rocket, but the launch failed. This was followed two years later by a successful test launch that carried a payload to the edge of space. Toyota has been collaborating with Interstellar since 2020, according to the company, providing its staff to help the rocket startup lower production costs and work toward mass production of its launch vehicles.

Toyota started construction woven cityPrototype of a futuristic city located at the base of Japan’s Mount Fiji. It is considered a pilot for innovative products and services, and Toyota is looking at establishing a Starlink-like telecommunications network to support the Woven City. “When you think about continuously moving cars, you have to have proper telecommunications,” said Hajime Kumabe, CEO of BONA by Toyota. quoted says TechCrunch. “This means that communication should not be interrupted, should not be disrupted, and that uninterrupted communication…is achieved.”

By partnering with Interstellar, Toyota could aim to gain access to a launch vehicle to place communications satellites into orbit. That particular business model is similar to SpaceX, which uses its trusty Falcon 9 rocket to launch batches of Starlink satellites into orbit. If its rockets are anything like its cars, Japan may have a reliable, affordable vehicle for future space travel.