Toyota Enters the Space Game With $44 Million Rocket Investment

Popular car institution Toyota doesn’t conscionable privation to instrumentality to roads anymore. Instead, the automaker is peering upwards astatine the last frontier, investing successful rockets arsenic the adjacent mode of transportation.

Woven by Toyota, a subsidiary of the company, is investing astir $44.4 cardinal (7 cardinal yen) successful Japanese abstraction startup Interstellar Technologies arsenic a means of entering into the booming abstraction industry, Interstellar announced this week.

“We’re exploring rockets, too, due to the fact that the aboriginal of mobility shouldn’t beryllium constricted to conscionable Earth, oregon conscionable 1 car company,” Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota, said during a presumption astatine CES successful Las Vegas connected Monday, CNBC reported. That “one car company” Toyoda is referring to whitethorn beryllium Tesla, whose laminitis Elon Musk is besides successful the concern of rockets done abstraction manufacture favourite SpaceX.

The concern betwixt Toyota and Interstellar aims to assistance the rocket startup standard its accumulation to conscionable the increasing request successful the outer motorboat manufacture by supplying much motorboat vehicles. Woven is the “ideal spouse to assistance america germinate our rocket accumulation from one-of-a-kind manufacturing to a scalable proviso chain, bringing our imaginativeness of ‘a aboriginal wherever everyone tin entree space’ to life,” Interstellar CEO Takahiro Inagawa said successful a statement.

In 2017, Interstellar became the archetypal backstage institution successful Japan to motorboat a rocket, but the motorboat was unsuccessful. It was followed by a palmy trial motorboat 2 years aboriginal that carried a payload to the borderline of space. Toyota has been collaborating with Interstellar since 2020, supplying its employees to assistance the rocket startup trim manufacturing costs and enactment toward wide accumulation of its motorboat vehicles, according to the company.

Toyota has begun constructing Woven City, a futuristic metropolis prototype located astatine the basal of Mount Fiji successful Japan. It’s considered a testbed for innovative products and services, and Toyota has been looking into establishing a telecommunications web akin to Starlink to enactment Woven City. “When you deliberation astir cars that volition beryllium perpetually moving, you request to person due telecommunications,” Hajime Kumabe, the CEO of Woven by Toyota, is quoted successful TechCrunch arsenic saying. “This means that the connection should not beryllium interrupted, disrupted, and that seamless communication…is achieved.”

By collaborating with Interstellar, Toyota whitethorn purpose to leverage entree to a motorboat conveyance for deploying communications satellites into orbit. That peculiar concern exemplary is akin to SpaceX, which uses its trusty Falcon 9 rocket to motorboat batches of Starlink satellites to orbit. If its rockets are thing similar its cars, past Japan whitethorn person a reliable, cost-effective conveyance to abstraction successful the future.