GoKawiilWelcome to Edition 9.10 of the Rocket Report! This week we’re celebrating a historic moment in Europe when a German rocket company successfully put its launch vehicle into orbit. Isar Aerospace became the first purely commercial European company to reach orbit, and impressively it did so on just its second launch attempt. How quickly can they scale up operations? How quickly will the second European launch firm reach this goal? Big questions, which for now we don’t have answers to.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Isar Aerospace takes a huge step forward. Isar Aerospace, founded in 2018 by three students at a German university, successfully launched a privately developed rocket into low-Earth orbit on Saturday from a Norwegian spaceport inside the Arctic Circle. The two-stage rocket, Spectrum, became the first fully commercial launch vehicle in Europe to reach orbit, Ars reports. With Saturday’s success, Isar becomes the clear leader among a pack of several European launch startups vying to inject some competition into Europe’s stagnant launch market.
Private capital emerges … It took eight years for Isar to get to orbit, a timetable similar to other successful commercial rocket startups in the West. In that time, the company raised roughly $1 billion through several private financing rounds and now has a workforce of nearly 500 employees. European space officials hope a jolt of competition will light a fire under the continent’s rocket industry. European governments are accustomed to footing the bill and having a say in where rockets are built, a procurement model known as geographical return, or geo-return. The paradigm is different with companies like Isar, which established themselves on a privately funded basis, with ambitions to eventually attract commercial and government business.