Japanese Space Tourism Company Receives Investments
A planned suborbital space plane. Credit: (PD AeroSpace Ltd. / Koike Terumasa Design and Aerospace)
A Japanese company hoping to build a suborbital tourism vehicle has received an investment from ANA Holding and a Japanese travel agency.
The airline, Japan’s largest by sales, invested ¥20.4 million ($179,000) into PD Aerospace in October, while H.I.S. Co., the nation’s largest publicly listed travel agent by sales, invested ¥30 million [$264,390] at the same time, the companies said in a joint statement with PD Aerospace Thursday.
PD Aerospace, founded in 2007, is vying with billionaire Branson’s commercial space company Virgin Galactic and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin to ferry individuals to the edge of space in reusable craft. The Japanese company is first developing a smaller unmanned craft and will then build a ship capable of carrying as many as eight people 100 kilometers above the Earth.
“We need bigger investments in the future,” PD Aerospace President Shuji Ogawa told reporters in Tokyo. Creating a space craft is “taking longer than planned because we didn’t have the funds,” he said.
The company is aiming to start commercial flights with a manned craft in December 2023, it said in the statement. Its website listed 2020 as the targeted year.
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4 responses to “Japanese Space Tourism Company Receives Investments”
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While I have quarrels about the engineering of these spaceplanes, look at those lines! I always thought the F7U was the most beautiful fighter to be lost to history.
$400K is barely a seedling round…
I’ts a long way to a flight vehicle
Nice lifting body design that provides a spacious cabin for zero G. Certainly. Lift provided in early flight and upon decent.
Japan might be the one country where sub-orbital tourism actually becomes a thing.