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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takafumi_Horie

  The veracity of the suspicions aside, many smelled conspiracy given the timing of the action. It was seen as a political move by defenders of the status quo to punish Horie for daring to challenge them, and to discredit him and the business practices he had come to represent, which Horie's opponents considered distasteful and "un-Japanese".

I mean, considering we have been hearing a lot of stories about karoshi & the pervasive seniority culture lately, I think I am siding on his side a lot more, given that even people feels like the yakuza did a much better job at welfare sometimes.

Indenting with spaces turns on code formatting. Please don't format text as code; it's unreadable on mobile.

Here's the quote:

> The veracity of the suspicions aside, many smelled conspiracy given the timing of the action. It was seen as a political move by defenders of the status quo to punish Horie for daring to challenge them, and to discredit him and the business practices he had come to represent, which Horie's opponents considered distasteful and "un-Japanese".

So do you assert that both the district court and the supreme court were part of a conspiracy to discredit an entrepreneur? Or merely that the prosecutor got an accurate tip-off from some hostile party?

Not completely sharing the GP's point of view, but I also think there is more than meets the eyes.

It could be a combination of most players in the field being in an illegal state in some way or another (not by accident, just that fraud is the norm) and they decided to enforce the rules on one specific company at a strategic time, while the rest of the industry hums along unscratched.

"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.

Yes, exactly, amateurs have gone well above 100km (62.5 miles).

https://rocketry.wordpress.com/2014/08/18/amateur-rocket-tea...

To be clear, only one amateur rocketry team (the one in the link) ever made it to space.

And to be honest a reasonable portion of that team was made up of aerospace professionals. You kinda expect to win your local basketball comp if you have a team with more than one NBA player slumming it for the love of the game.

Note that this was not an orbital flight but rather a sounding rocket.

Japan has had sounding rockets for ~50 years. So this was the first privately funded rocket to reach space or something?

Not sure if the title was changed, but yep. Sounds like it.

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.

I also thought it had a lot of lateral movement.

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?

*Edit: Richard Branson of Virgin Group, not Charles Bronson.

Do you mean Richard Branson rather than the actor known as Charles Bronson?

That said, lots of people are benefactors of health and medicine. Maybe they don’t get the same notoriety, but maybe they weren’t looking for it either.

Ack, you're right, Charles Bronson.

Both the wealthy and society as a whole spend way more on medical science than space. It's fairly common in the US for every wing of a hospital or every building in a medical school to be named after some rich businessman who is doing just that.

Bill and Melinda Gates being notable exceptions of course.

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.

It's Hatsune Miku, a synthesized computer voice.

https://blog.piapro.net/2019/04/z1904231-1.html

Never change, japan

She does “hologram” concerts.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/04/...

Not real holograms but interesting still. Apparently some ARkit stuff recently

You can take it to the bank, the Japanese will never change unless coerced, by the US Military after world war II for instance.

Though there's some weird reverb or similar going on too I think, not simply the odd choice of a synthesized speaker for the countdown.

Yes, counting down and then counting up again

The article's title is more clear; this is about a space company.

Perhaps biased, but my initial thought when I see the word "launch" (without context, such as this title) is a software product launch of some kind.

Maybe you should specify “aerospace”...

Drats, I was hoping the anime "Rocket Girls" would move to real life.