Quietly, Japan has established itself as a power in the aerospace industry
It's not just Japan but also China, India, Russia, and the EU that each have ambitious space programs and have had them for quite some time. The US has historically been leading the pack as space programs have been very expensive. However, what we are seeing now is commoditization of technology and vast decreases in cost. SpaceX has quite effectively shown that you can out compete bigger players with a combination of modest availability of capital, talent and out of the box thinking. The level of their capital expenses is quite a lot more reasonable than what it took Nasa to get to the Moon or running the space shuttle program. It gets it down to the level where aspiring billionaires can get things done in reasonable time frames on reasonable budgets (Bezos, Musk, Branson, etc.). Likewise, any multinational or country with access to similar resources can hope to achieve similar results.<p>So, there is going to be a wave of countries, companies, and people trying to get to emulate SpaceX. Of course the military angle here is scary. Several of these countries are also nuclear powers and the nature of space rockets is that once you can get them to space, delivering payloads back anywhere on earth is relatively straightforward. That used to be the exclusive domain of the US and Russia. That's no longer true.