Over the last decade, nearly $300 billion has been poured into equity investments in private space companies. The U.S. captured almost half of this, China close to a third. Japan, by contrast, has barely registered – until now.

Japan’s nascent space startup sector, which quietly emerged in the 2010s, is finally taking off as a real business. Last month, the fourth Japanese space startup in two years held an IPO. A few weeks ago, Toyota Motor announced a second investment in a space startup, and last year, the government launched a multi-billion-dollar fund to support private space firms over the next decade.

The space boom has several practical applications to Japan’s energy sector. Some of these startups are testing energy production technologies in the stratosphere and above, seeking either to beam electrons back down to Earth or create fuel to power further space exploration. China has similar plans, recently unveiling a project to build an orbiting solar power station with 1 MW of capacity by 2030.

There is another vital reason for Japan to explore space: raw materials. With sparse key resources within its own land mass, the country is searching for new sources of critical elements such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earths. These materials are indispensable for everything from batteries to wind turbines, and chips for decentralized energy systems. And certain parts of space are estimated to hold an astronomical amount of these elements.