It seems crazy that a company that’s only really known for cars, motorbikes, tuning forks, heat pumps, brake pads, pens, tractors, fertilizer, display panels, outboard motors, pneumatic systems, oil tankers, furniture, locomotives, bricks, solar panels, ATVs, generators, hot air balloons, dinghies, hydrogen fuel cells, submarines, crop dusters, jet engines, cultivators, hedge trimmers, lawnmowers, precision optics and robots would suddenly pivot to rockets.
It’s almost like they’re an engineering company.
Crazy, right?
To be fair to Honda, they are doing what is expected of any companies in a capitalist system, actually innovate and diversify in order to remain competitive. Most other companies would rather stick to their traditional products and services, even if those products and services are written on the wall that they are becoming obsolete.
Isn’t that Yamaha? Or is Honda the same?
Mitsubishi too
None of these answers are wrong.
Pretty sure we had CRTs in highschool, back when I was a teen many years ago that were Kia brand… IIRC.
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Yamaha is definitely in tune with the music. I never remember which is which, but their logo is tuning forks and depending on the product the tuning forks can extend past the circle. I think their motorcycles have it extending past.
I’m a huge fan of Yamaha guitars. Great workmanship at a very affordable price, and if you buy used you can get them super cheap. My best guitar, an FG730S, which plays and sounds as good as any expensive gourmet brands, was only $102 at auction. I even bought another one as a backup. Used Yamaha guitars are the best deal on the market.
It says Honda right on the side of the engine.
No, that’s Nintendo
No, they’re the playing card company.
The impressive part is that they are also known for being reliable, there are the occasional issues, but overall very trustworthy products.
Like how the 2018-2021 Honda Civics shipped with non functioning AC because they used the wrong type of refrigerant? They’ve also trained dealerships to deny the warranty!
It’s been in the 90s all week - I risk heat stroke in my fucking car going to work!
It’s actually interesting how similar rockets and jet engines are. You could think of a rocket as a jet (or sometimes two jet engines) where the afterburner is always on and the air intake is replaced by an O2 tank…
a rocket is a wingless airplane IMO
Edit: with oxygen tanks, as you said.
This is the first I have heard they were doing this. Makes spacex accomplishments less impressive. Fuck elon
Well, Honda is actually a competent company.
Hell yes. Any competition to musk is very much needed.
Go Honda.
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.
You have it the wrong way round. SpaceX’s accomplishments are impressive despite Elon.
well Honda did this a decade later so there still is some achievement spacex has done 🤷
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.
Honda built a rocket
Me: of course they did.
They launched the rocket
Me: naturally.
They landed the rocket.
Me: on the first try?
My buddy’s 2 million mile ‘95 civic says this is a sure bet
This wasn’t much more than a toy rocket:
6.3 m in length, 85 cm in diameter,
The test was completed successfully, the first time Honda landed a rocket after reaching an altitude of nearly 300 meters.But still they were successful on their first try, so we will have to see where they take it from here. 🚀
It’s proof of tech. It’d be stupid and wasteful to do all the tests on a full size rocket.
There’s a YouTube channel called BPS Space where this guy spent 7 years learning how to land a model rocket space x style. He talked about how much you can learn about real rocket science even from a small model.
This is the same guy.
You mean like Starship?
I plead the 5th…
Whatever they tested it’s probably proof of that, but such a small rocket and only 300 meters means that a lot of things were not really proven, because scale is a HUGE issue.
Just ask Elon Musk / SpaceX, the Falcon rocket is fine, but Starship is horrible. And the difference is scale.That is not why starship fails. Starship fails because like everything that Elon does lately it emphasizes style over practicality. Starship is a very badly designed rocket that looks cool to Elon. Not unlike the Cyber truck which has been an abject failure in every way possible.
My personal opinion is that it fails because SpaceX, like a lot of space startups, embrace a silicon valley coding mindset of ‘move fast and break things’, which results in them spending much more of their time and effort on testing than on design. Make a change, test, make a subsequent change, test. It gets them to a working prototype more quickly than legacy space/ defense companies. However, there’s no emphasis on modeling or design, which is problematic for solving complex problems that haven’t been solved for 50 years already.
You are missing the point that size makes a difference. Obviously SpaceX has the technology to do what Honda did, but SpaceX can do ti with a real rocket.
But they can’t do it with the bigger Starship rocket. Scale matters.And when SpaceX does it with real full size rockets and they explode scattering debris and chemicals everywhere, the nearby towns pay the price.
I don’t see any towns being decimated by Honda’s approach.
I am ABSOLUTELY not praising SpaceX, I’m just using them as an example of how scale makes all the difference at least for some of the components. And being able to launch a small rocket is evidence they can launch a big one too.
Size is only a proof of logistics. Not tech. Physics don’t change fundamentally between 6 meters and 120 meters. You learn a lot from scale modeling without the added costs. Starship’s real challenge is actually the logistics necessary to fulfill the desired specifications and experimenting with engineering to reach the scale. The most innovative aspect of Starship would be orbital refueling, and they aren’t there since the thing hasn’t reached orbit yet. SpaceX problem right now is insisting on high turnover engineering, which doesn’t work at scale without heavy costs, because it is a logistic problem, not a engineering problem.
Physics don’t change fundamentally between 6 meters and 120 meters
Yes it does. Mass to strength ratio of structural components changes with scale. So does the thrust to mass ratio of a rocket and its fuel. So does heat dissipation (affected by ratio of surface area to mass).
And I don’t know shit about fluid dynamics, but I’m skeptical that things scale cleanly, either.
Scaling upward will encounter challenges not apparent at small sizes. That goes for everything from engineering bridges to buildings to cars to boats to aircraft to spacecraft.
I hope they crush SpaceX one day.
By landing on them.
Honda is cool they build robotics and the best motorbikes in the world per cost
other motorbike, mix up at the factory, enjoy your rocket
Guess we doin rockets now
We got Honda launching rockets before GTA 6
I thought Rockstar was going to launch GTA 6
“Listen here you little shit…”
Since when is Honda a rocket company? This is literally the first im hearing about this. They kept this quiet for a while, and im not sure why.
Well they have been making crotch rockets for a long time.
isn’t that Hitachi?
It’s new. Honda Space Development Division.
Honda R&D to Conduct Testing with Sierra Space and Tec-Masters on the International Space Station | Honda Global Corporate Website https://share.google/3CwIsYUh8eWsohht4
A lot of the global conglomerate Asian based companies do R&D across many fields, rather than just the product they’re most know for. Toshiba makes nuclear reactors! Samsung has phones and sewing machines and microchips… and nuclear reactors research.
Good for them, Asia is getting their rocket programs in order while the U.S. tries their best to destroy ours. Man i wish I could move.
Of all the manufacturing companies, I would expect nothing less from Honda.
An alternative to starlink would be great.
Yeah, they could have a product ready by 2045! (If they hurry and make it a priority)
Genuinely curious: how many explosions before the successful test?
Apparently they got it right on the first try.
Now that’s the real win.
I wanna buy one and see what it can do with an old 4 cylinder VTEC out of a Civic Si.
And Hyundai is making hydrogen powered tanks, what a world. I wonder if hydrogen fuels poses any unique risks as compared to petrol.
I wonder if hydrogen fuels poses any unique risks as compared to petrol.
It’s highly explosive.
Something something hindenberg…
Well, different. You’d have highly compressed hydrogen in a cylindrical pressure vessel.
The Hindenburg just burned, actually it was mostly its highly flammable paint that caught fire. When a pressure vessel is ruptured, it explodes in a big way, or it quickly removes itself from the vehicle like a mini rocket.
It’s highly explosive
That’s … why i’m here
This is a feature, not a bug.
Explosion wise or climate wise?
I guess both? I know climate wise the manufacture of those things cannot be climate friendly.
At the end of the day, making EV cars isn’t either unfortunately…but in the grand scheme of things. Both hydrogen and EV cars are more environmentally friendly than gas powered cars.
Manufacturing of any kind always causes an environmental impact. This is the way of things.
The one thing we can’t get that would mitigate the environmental costs of making stuff, is if stuff was built to last…
any sources?
For the production of the tank itself or the likelihood of environmental impact?
Here is an article about the tank, it appears to still be in the proof of concept stage. As for my conjecture that it would likely have a high carbon impact during production that was based mostly on similar studies 2 done on the production of cars.
i guess both?
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I wonder how it feels when VTEC kicks in on a literal rocket
