Toyota Is Heading to Space With $44 Million Investment in Rockets

Toyota is unshackling itself from the confines of its terrestrial aspirations. Now the Japanese automotive company that made the used Corolla you drove in high school is setting its sights on the stars.

Toyota is investing $44.4 billion in Japanese space startup Interstellar Technologies through a subsidiary called Woven by Toyota. One day, when we’re all able to easily hop from planet to planet in our solar system using a personal spacecraft, we’ll be able to trace the existence of our Space Corolla back to this moment.

Toyota Invests $44M in Space Startup Company

Specifically, Toyota wants to get into rocket technology and carve out a niche for itself in the burgeoning private space exploration industry, currently dominated by the likes of Elon Musk’s Space X, Jeff Bazo’s Blue Origin, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. Toyota wants to scale up Interstellar’s rocket production with a short-term goal of meeting the high demand for satellite launches.

Not that we need more satellites up there, considering there’s an enormous amount of space junk causing all sorts of problems in the Earth’s orbit. Woven, aka Toyota, wants to facilitate Interstellar’s long-term goal of mass-producing launch vehicles and making space travel more accessible.

Taking a play out of Elon Musk’s playbook, Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda envisions a future where Toyota gets into the telecommunications business by launching communication satellites, a la Musk’s Starlink.

Assuming Toyota is successful in its space efforts, we may one day live in a future where Americans lament the fact that they bought an American-made spacecraft instead of going with the more reliable Toyota spacecraft.