Space Battleship Yamato!

Despite the title, this is not a fandom TL, and is not intended to be ASB beyond the admittedly extremely dubious premise.

After the Meiji revolution, Japan felt a need to prove its superiority to all other nations. But military conquest wouldn’t work, and economic domination was too quiet, so they decided to go down another road: Japan would be the first nation to reach the stars, or at least the moon and the inner planets. Given a similar dedication to this endeavour as the nation showed to their attempts at Asian conquest, how far could they actually get?
 
True, but could Japan actually build one? Basically, could Japan obtain the resources needed to run a useful a domestic space program?
 
Well, not attack the USA for starters in 1941.
It involves getting out of China, and throwing lots of money at Goddard in the '30s

I do like the idea of Truk as a Space Launch facility.
 
Well, that's the point of the thread: can this be done without going into ASB territory?
Well, as someone said, if a Japanese scientist can come up with the Orion concept MAYBE... but the resulting arms race would make it a shit show and leave Japan quite under armed.
 
Oh, I'm not looking for an actual space battleship; that's more than slightly ridiculous. Just a Japanese space program capable of being the first to reach the Moon.
 
Considering there is mo TL, sure. If this is the emperors Wilson, he avoids the invasion of China, and politically is able to restrain the army- sure they could. They managed great economic growth post WW2.
 
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