Popular car company Toyota doesn’t just want to stick to roads anymore. Instead, the automaker is peering upwards at the final frontier, investing in rockets as the next mode of transportation.
Woven by Toyota, a subsidiary of the company, is investing around $44.4 million (7 billion yen) in Japanese space startup Interstellar Technologies as a means of entering into the booming space industry, Interstellar announced this week.
“We’re exploring rockets, too, because the future of mobility shouldn’t be limited to just Earth, or just one car company,” Akio Toyoda, chairman of Toyota, said during a presentation at CES in Las Vegas on Monday, CNBC reported. That “one car company” Toyoda is referring to may be Tesla, whose founder Elon Musk is also in the business of rockets through space industry favorite SpaceX.
The partnership between Toyota and Interstellar aims to help the rocket startup scale its production to meet the growing demand in the satellite launch industry by supplying more launch vehicles. Woven is the “ideal partner to help us evolve our rocket production from one-of-a-kind manufacturing to a scalable supply chain, bringing our vision of ‘a future where everyone can access space’ to life,” 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 carried a payload to the edge of space. Toyota has been collaborating with Interstellar since 2020, supplying its employees to help the rocket startup reduce manufacturing costs and work toward mass production of its launch vehicles, according to the company.
Toyota has begun constructing Woven City, a futuristic city prototype located at the base of Mount Fiji in Japan. It’s considered a testbed for innovative products and services, and Toyota has been looking into establishing a telecommunications network similar to Starlink to support Woven City. “When you think about cars that will be constantly moving, you need to have appropriate telecommunications,” Hajime Kumabe, the CEO of Woven by Toyota, is quoted in TechCrunch as saying. “This means that the communication should not be interrupted, disrupted, and that seamless communication…is achieved.”
By collaborating with Interstellar, Toyota may aim to leverage access to a launch vehicle for deploying 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 to orbit. If its rockets are anything like its cars, then Japan may have a reliable, cost-effective vehicle to space in the future.
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