Land, Sea, and Space: Building Japan’s Next Spaceport Economy
Japan land-and-sea spaceport model
Based on a conversation with
Kei Shimada
Chief Business Officer, Innovative Space Carrier Inc.
Japan has built one of the world’s largest economies on a relatively small amount of usable land. That geography has shaped its cities, industries, and relationship with the sea, and it may also shape the future of its spaceports.
The country stretches more than 2,000 miles (or approximately 3,000 kilometers) from north to south, yet according to Kei Shimada of Innovative Space Carrier (ISC), approximately 70 percent of it is mountainous, leaving little room for large new infrastructure such as spaceports.
Rather than treating the surrounding water as a boundary, Shimada and the New Spaceport Working Group see it as part of the infrastructure. Established in August 2024 as the first of its kind in Japan, the group is led by Shimada’s team at ISC and is dedicated to creating a vision for next-generation spaceports.
That vision separates the functions traditionally concentrated at a terrestrial spaceport. Transportation, maintenance, business activity, hospitality, and other services could remain on land near major population centers, while mobile vessels or barges support launch and landing operations offshore.
The result is more than a different way to launch a rocket. It is a different way to think about the spaceport itself, connecting land, sea, and ultimately space as parts of one economic ecosystem.
Designing a Spaceport Around Japan
The New Spaceport Working Group is now in its second phase, bringing together 12 companies and a university to examine the details of how a future spaceport should function. The group is looking beyond the launch facility to consider the responsibilities of both the land and water sides of the operation.
That distinction is particularly relevant in Japan.
Limited usable land makes it difficult to dedicate large areas to launch infrastructure, particularly near the major cities where transportation networks, businesses, workforce, visitors, and other resources are already concentrated.
A land-and-sea model could allow the two environments to do what each does best.
The land side can connect the spaceport with roads, rail, airports, businesses, universities, hotels, restaurants, maintenance facilities, and communities. The water side can provide space for launch and landing operations that benefit from greater separation from populated areas.
For Shimada, this is not simply a water-launch project. The working group is studying the essential components of the entire spaceport ecosystem, from landing and maintenance facilities to cryogenic systems, fuel, healthcare, and eventually the needs of astronauts and space travelers.
The spaceport becomes the connection point between all of them.
Making Launch Mobile
Mobility adds another dimension to the model.
Japan regularly experiences typhoons and other significant weather events. A fixed launch site has to operate within the conditions at that particular location. Shimada sees the possibility of a mobile water-launch platform being repositioned according to changing weather patterns, potentially helping improve launch cadence.
He described a scenario in which a platform could move north toward Hokkaido when a typhoon approaches from the south, allowing operators to select a more favorable launch location rather than waiting for conditions at one fixed site to improve.
Moving the launch point can also provide greater flexibility in accessing different orbits. A terrestrial site is constrained by its geographic location and the trajectories that can safely be flown from it. A water-based launch platform introduces the possibility of selecting a launch location based in part on the needs of the mission.
Those advantages are particularly relevant across Asia. Shimada pointed to the region’s long shorelines, islands, mountains, forests, and limited available land as reasons water launch could become increasingly important as Asian countries seek to increase launch activity.
Southeast Asia offers a clear example. The region has no operational orbital launch site of its own, leaving its countries dependent on existing spaceports in the West, India, China, Australia and Japan. From a national security perspective, that dependence carries real risk: it will be critical for governments to have their own launch capabilities to send sensitive payloads, such as military and government satellites, into space. Thailand has made building its own spaceport a national priority. Deputy Prime Minister Yodchanan Wongsawat, who also serves as Minister of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, has presented plans for a commercial spaceport intended for peaceful purposes. The project would be developed with the Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (GISTDA) through a public-private partnership. It is part of a broader push for Thailand to move from buying space technology to creating it. The government has pointed to the country’s relative proximity to the equator, which can reduce rocket fuel costs by up to 20 percent and allow for larger payloads, as well as rising demand from expanding low Earth orbit satellite constellations. Because most Southeast Asian nations lie along the sea and share similar geographical characteristics, the blueprint being developed by the New Spaceport Working Group could offer an effective answer for the region.
For Japan itself, mobility could help turn geography from a constraint into an asset.
The Spaceport Is More Than the Launch
Building the launch capability, however, is only part of Shimada’s vision.
He believes future spaceports need to borrow an important lesson from another form of transportation infrastructure: airports.
Major airports are economic ecosystems. People work there, shop there, eat there, conduct business there, stay in nearby hotels, and visit them for reasons extending well beyond boarding an airplane. The businesses surrounding the transportation function help make the larger ecosystem economically productive.
Shimada believes spaceports need to develop in much the same way.
“Spaceports, people tend to think, well, we’re going to go there to launch,” he said. Instead, he envisions an airport-like ecosystem where people visit a spaceport for a variety of reasons, whether or not they are traveling to space.
That could include restaurants, retail, tourism, entertainment, education, technology demonstrations, and experiences connected to the growing space economy.
It also changes the relationship between a spaceport and the surrounding community. Instead of an isolated piece of infrastructure that becomes active primarily around launch operations, the spaceport can become a destination and a center of continuous economic activity.
Creating Reasons to Visit a Spaceport
That idea becomes even more important when considering launch cadence.
There will be days when rockets are not launching. Infrastructure, businesses, and communities still need economic activity during those periods.
Shimada argues that spaceport developers need to think beyond traditional space-industry revenue models and explore how other industries can become part of the ecosystem. He discussed entertainment, marketing, retail, and other businesses as potential sources of activity and revenue that could help support the larger spaceport model.
The idea is not to turn a spaceport into a shopping center with a rocket pad attached. It is to recognize that transportation hubs create economic opportunities around the movement of people, goods, technology, and ideas.
Spaceports can do the same.
As human spaceflight expands, that opportunity becomes even larger. ISC is already thinking about the needs of future space travelers and how hospitality and travel services might integrate with the spaceport experience. In October 2025, ISC and Nippon Travel Agency announced a partnership, spearheaded by Shimada’s team, to develop space travel as a tourism business. The rollout is planned in stages, beginning with space-themed tours and food-tasting experiences and leading to point-to-point suborbital flights, launched from offshore, that could connect cities such as Tokyo and New York in about an hour.
The companies are targeting the start of service in the 2030s, at approximately 100 million yen per passenger for a round trip, with advance applications opening in fiscal 2026 and orbital stays envisioned for the 2040s. “We hope this business will be a new starting point to connect space travel and tourism,” said Nippon Travel Agency President Keigo Yoshida.
The passenger journey to space begins long before the vehicle leaves the ground.
Building an Economy Around the Spaceport
A successful spaceport also needs people.
Engineers and technicians are part of that workforce, but a large spaceport ecosystem extends far beyond aerospace occupations. It requires transportation, construction, hospitality, healthcare, education, retail, public services, housing, and the businesses that support the people who work within the ecosystem.
The New Spaceport Working Group has begun examining that larger economic picture.
Shimada said the group has created a feasible study report (available for purchase) that included calculations for the construction of a combined land facility and water-launch system, how long it could take to reach profitability, and how many jobs the development could potentially support. The scale considered in the study led the group to think beyond the spaceport itself and toward the infrastructure required to support a substantial new community.
Housing matters. Schools matter. Hospitals matter. Transportation matters.
So do the restaurants, stores, suppliers, service providers, educational institutions, and other businesses that emerge around a growing industry.
That is where spaceport development becomes economic development.
Connecting the Community to Space
The public can also become part of that ecosystem.
A mobile platform creates the possibility of bringing launch activity to different coastal locations. Shimada compared the idea with offshore fireworks displays, imagining a future in which people who have never experienced a rocket launch could see one off the coast from their own region.
That has value beyond tourism.
Seeing space activity can help make an industry that often feels distant more tangible to the communities supporting it. A child watching a launch may become curious about engineering. A local business may recognize an opportunity to serve the growing industry. A university may develop a new program. A company may decide to establish operations nearby.
The economic ecosystem and the human ecosystem begin to reinforce each other.
For a spaceport to become a long-term part of a community, people need to see opportunities for themselves within it.
A Gateway to the Space Economy
Launch will remain one of the defining capabilities of a spaceport, but it does not have to define its entire economic purpose.
A future Japanese spaceport could connect terrestrial transportation and businesses on land with mobile launch infrastructure at sea. Around those operations could grow manufacturing, maintenance, education, hospitality, tourism, retail, workforce development, research, and other industries supporting both the spaceport and the community around it.
And beyond the launch itself is the larger destination: the space economy.
Spaceports are the gateways connecting activity on Earth with the opportunities developing beyond it. The stronger the ecosystem surrounding that gateway becomes, the more ways communities and businesses can participate in what comes next.
Japan’s geography may require a different approach to building that gateway. Its limited land, extensive coastline, existing transportation networks, and surrounding ocean create an opportunity to rethink where a spaceport begins and ends.
The launch pad can move to the water while much of the economic activity remains connected to the shore. Together, the land and sea infrastructure can provide the pathway to space.
Shimada sees the blueprint traveling beyond Japan as well. A land-and-sea spaceport model is an exportable package, not only of the know-how required to plan, build, and operate large-scale infrastructure, but also of people. Japan could send engineers, operators, and other specialists to help develop local talent in partner countries, building the workforce each spaceport will need to sustain itself. Strategically, a network of spaceports built on a shared model across ASEAN could give the region mutual launch capability redundancy, so that if one site is unavailable because of weather, maintenance, or other disruptions, partners can rely on another.
Land, sea, and space become parts of the same economy, with the spaceport connecting them all.
