Toyota reveals rover, 2029 moon landing plans with Japanese space agency

Toyota revealed plans for a moon rover in collaboration with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on Tuesday.

The Japanese automaker and JAXA announced their hopes for a 2029 moon landing at a symposium in Tokyo.

“At JAXA, we are studying various scenarios as well as technologies that will be applied to specific space missions,” JAXA Vice President Koichi Wakata said at the event, according to a press release.

“Manned, pressurized rovers will be an important element supporting human lunar exploration, which we envision will take place in the 2030s. We aim at launching such a rover into space in 2029,” he added.

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Toyota and JAXA have already been collaborating on the manned, pressurized rover, according to the release.

The vehicle uses Toyota’s fuel cell vehicle technologies and would have a cruising range of more than 6,000 miles on the surface of the moon, despite limited amounts of fuel that can be brought there.

The automaker’s fuel cells use clean power-generation methods and only emit water and have reduced amounts of harmful substances that the car company is working to improve, Toyota Executive Vice President Shigeki Terashi said Tuesday.

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The proposed rover would be “about the size of two microbuses” or about 19.6 feet long, 17 feet wide and 12.4 feet tall, according to the dimensions in the release.

“The automotive industry has long done business with the concepts of ‘hometown’ and ‘home country’ largely in mind. However, from now on, in responding to such matters as environmental issues of global scale, the concept of ‘home planet’, from which all of us come, will become a very important concept,” Toyota President Akio Toyoda said.