Wouldn’t you love to have been a fly on the wall at that Honda Board meeting however long ago?
Motorcycle market is saturated. Competition from Toyota and South Korean manufacturers is increasing, and future price competition from Chinese manufacturers is going to destroy profitability. What to do?
I know! Let’s get into the reusable rocket business!
It is a very different market from consumer automotive products. But SpaceX has shown the technology exists. Now the future will belong to the entities with superior manufacturing competence (Honda’s strength) and the ability to scale up rapidly to keep launch prices down. Is that a worthwhile gamble for Honda?
The more one thinks about Honda’s successful test, the stranger it is. Blue Origin, funded by Bezos’ bottomless wealth has fiddled around for decades and is only slowly getting anywhere. Then Honda comes out of nowhere to test a reusable rocket launch & retrieval – perhaps even on their first attempt. This makes it look easy, when we know it is not. Strange!
re investment in such “improbable” technologies as “Space Drive”, the argument I’ve been making since my 1992 wealth tax proposal leading to Militia.Money:
Structural centralization of wealth has so-distanced capital authority from its investments that Nick Szabo’s argument in “Pascal’s Scams” reverses the SEC’s meaning of “qualified investor” in “risky” technologies:
Perceived risk is relative to one’s knowledge-distance from the investment. What the SEC gets right is that the wealthy can afford to lose a lot more money than the rest of us. However, there is an insidious underlying assumption: Trust The Experts. This assumption underlies the emergence of what is called The Managerial State which is little more than a vicious cycle that centralizes wealth and power in the hands of those who make the policies that determine centralization of wealth and power.
What my 1992 proposal hence Militia.Money do:
Place the wealth in the hands of The Experts as operationally demonstrated by their ability to make money rather than sit on money. Experts like Elon Musk*.
I’m afraid we’re all going to have to go Genghis Khan on their Managerial Asses before they kill us all.
* The fact that Elon Musk hasn’t (to the best of my knowledge) invested in BrLP is far weaker evidence against BrLP’s technology than it would be if Militia.Money were the monetary regime.
