The popular automotive company Toyota no longer wants to limit itself to roads. Instead, the automaker is looking up to the final frontier by investing in rockets as the next mode of transportation.
Woven by Toyota, a subsidiary of Toyota, is investing about $44.4 million (7 billion yen) in Japanese space startup Interstellar Technologies as a means of entering the booming space industry, Interstellar announced this week.
“We are also exploring rockets because the future of mobility should not be limited to the Earth or to just one car company,” said Akio Toyoda, Toyota’s chairman, during a presentation at the CES in Las Vegas on Monday, CNBC reported. The “one car company” Toyoda is referring to could be Tesla, whose founder Elon Musk is also in the rocket business through space industry darling SpaceX.
The partnership between Toyota and Interstellar aims to help the rocket startup scale up its production to meet the growing demand in the satellite launch industry by supplying more launch vehicles. Woven is “an ideal partner to help us evolve our rocket manufacturing from a one-of-a-kind production facility to a scalable supply chain, realizing our vision of ‘a future where everyone can access space,'” Interstellar CEO Takahiro Inagawa said in a statement.
In 2017, Interstellar became the first private company in Japan to launch a rocket, but the launch was unsuccessful. It was followed by a successful test launch two years later that delivered a payload to the edge of space. Toyota has been cooperating with Interstellar since 2020, providing its employees to help the rocket startup reduce production costs and work on mass production of its launch vehicles, according to the company.
Toyota has started construction of Woven City, a prototype of a futuristic city located at the foot of Mount Fiji in Japan. This city is considered a testbed for innovative products and services, and Toyota is considering creating a Starlink-like telecommunications network to support Woven City. “When you think about cars that are going to be constantly moving, you need to have the appropriate telecommunications,” Hajime Kumabe, CEO of Woven by Toyota, was quoted as saying by TechCrunch, “which means that the connection should not be interrupted. “It means that communication should not be interrupted, disrupted, and that uninterrupted communication… is achieved.”
By partnering with Interstellar, Toyota could aim to gain access to a launch vehicle to deploy communications satellites in orbit. This particular business model is similar to SpaceX, which uses its reliable Falcon 9 rocket to launch batches of Starlink satellites into orbit. If its rockets are similar to cars, Japan could have a reliable, cost-effective vehicle for space travel in the future.
