A new spaceplane venture company “Space Walker� in Japan - Challenges in the last frontier both development and business

SPACE WALKER Inc. is the university space development start-up most recently established in Japan, which deals the business of development and operation of fully reusable winged suborbital spaceplanes including space tourism. It inherits the Japanese reusable space transportation research heritages such as winged suborbital rocket HIMES studied by ISAS of Ministry of Education and unmanned orbital space shuttle HOPE-X by NASDA of Japan, both of which are the former agencies of JAXA. It enhances their technologies based on the experimental winged rocket development by Kyushu Institute of Technology since 2005 in cooperation with JAXA, Japanese aerospace and non-aerospace companies. The top management executives of SPACE WALKER exquisitely combines both the former executives and engineers involved in Japanese major space development called “Legacy Space� and the young generation entrepreneurs with new business ideas so-called “New Space�.