Cool! Do you follow Japanese spaceflight at all?

Not really. I tried interviewing as a dev on a satellite company's site, but apparently they require that one be a citizen for various reasons. I did want to go see a launch when I first moved to Japan, but it worked out to be rather difficult and doubly so as I had no driving license at the time. I might have to look into it again as that would be pretty neat.

Doesn't that mean chicken or bird or something? I

tori does mean bird, yes :)

How do people handle the "ple"?

プリーズ (pu ri (long vowel marker) zu). Final 'u' gets devoiced in most cases and, anecdotally, many who say the word a lot devoice the first one as well. So pureez with the quality of the u varying from non-existent to schwa to normal (kinda like oo in moon but shorter)