In June of this year, Honda launched and landed a prototype, 20-foot-long reusable rocket at its research facility in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. Though the company is known mainly as an innovative and iterative carmaker, it is also a transportation conglomerate, having developed and produced motorcycles, scooters, e-bikes, ATVs, boat motors, and even jets. Its skunkworks R&D center built the world’s first in-car navigation system, the first mass-produced automatic braking system, and the first production Level-3 autonomous driving system. Still, aiming toward the stars and potentially launching a competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX seemed to stretch beyond even Honda’s wildly diversified capabilities. Yet according to Kazuo Sakurahara — a former director of Honda’s Formula One racing team who now runs the company’s space development strategy — it is a logical move. “Honda products have already expanded across land, sea, and sky,” Sakurahara says, from Honda’s R&D facility north of Tokyo, in his first conversation with the American press. “So, it is not surprising that space is the next field of opportunity.” “Honda products have already …