Since the name of founder Takafumi Horie may not ring many bells outside a Japanese audience, let's just say he's a colorful character:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takafumi_Horie" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takafumi_Horie</a>
"Go straight up until you leave the atmosphere and then fall down" is a radically different proposition than reaching orbit. You could lift an unprotected human being to space with a 700kg rocket. Getting him to orbit would require a 9,000kg rocket.
Getting to space for 8 minutes in a parabolic trajectory is not hard, it's the 7800-8200m/s delta v thrusting horizontally to achieve a real orbit that's difficult. I've seen amateurs launching garage built rockets from the Nevada desert hit 80km...
Does the rocket drift away from the launchpad right after launch and for the first couple of seconds, or is it an optical illusion? It appeared to me as if the rocket was imbalanced until it gained enough speed.
While this is awesome, I wonder why we hear a lot about businessmen who score big then funneling their wealth into moonshot projects about space exploration (Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Takafumi Horie, etc), but hardly ever on medical science and life extension. To me that seems like a much more urgent and personally relevant issue - I mean, without advancing the state of the art on those fields, even those rich & powerful men are all going to be dead in a mere 120 years. Why don't they seem to be doing much to address that when they're in the rare position to be able to do so?<p>*Edit: Richard Branson of Virgin Group, not Charles Bronson.
Can anyone shed light on whatever is going on with the audio in the video? It sounds vaguely like counting if the counting were done by some sort of creepy bunny cartoon.