Turns out "going fast and breaking stuff" is not a good policy if your goal is to make something that works reliably as fast as possible.

Unironically, yes.

If Honda can make a rocket as reliable and cheap as a Civic, relatively, we all win.

I didn't know Honda made sex toys.

Technically, orbit is just forward, really, really fast. "Up" is incidental to the process.

Was that a sonic boom? Nah, rev limiter!

The aftermarket spoiler market for these will be huge.

I expect we’ll see SpaceX rockets with VTEC stickers trying to masquerade as performance rockets.

Time to invest in Honda.

I doubt that. Spacex is miles ahead of the rest and they have bigger plans.

Sure they would rather have a monopoly on cheap rockets for as long as possible but they have always known people would be trying to catch them up

I don’t believe they have even hit space yet, the test was only from 1000 ft.

Still, cool as hell.

Wait. This is just more commodification of space.

Fuck that. And I will be against it until we figure out our fucking shit down here on the ground.

Now if they can pull that off with a rocket...

Is always going to take a massive amount of resources to get to space.

If your idea of 'democratized' is 'now giant megacorps have comparable capital and assets to entire nation states'...

You have a very, very silly understanding of democracy.

Please explain to me how a giant mega corp is... democratic in nature.

You are describing cyberpunk style, hypercorporate techno-feudalism as democracy.

Democracy is one person, one vote.

Corporate governance structures can basically be boiled down to: one dollar, one vote, ie, oligarchy.

Even if you didn't read the article, the op helpfully included the first few lines, which say that although Honda had said they were studying rocket technology, they made no announcements about this launch until it had already occurred.