Germany · Circle · Ars Technica
German company Isar Aerospace has successfully debuted Europe’s first entirely commercial orbital rocket
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Isar Aerospace, founded in 2018 by three students at a German university, successfully launched a privately-developed rocket into low-Earth orbit Saturday from a Norwegian spaceport inside the Arctic Circle.
Key facts
- Isar’s 92-foot-tall (28-meter) Spectrum rocket lifted off at 4:12 pm EST (20:12 UTC) Saturday from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway, where it was 10:12 pm local time as the final bluish hues
- The European Space Agency added $230 million (197.8 million euros) to Isar’s coffers last month with a contract through the European Launcher Challenge, which aims to support commercial launch
- In that time, the company raised roughly $1 billion through several private financing rounds, and now has a workforce of nearly 500 employees
- Many of the V-2’s engineers, led by Wernher von Braun, emigrated to the United States after World War II to work on rockets for the US military and NASA
Summary
The two-stage rocket, named Spectrum, became the first fully commercial launch vehicle in Europe to reach orbit. Isar’s 92-foot-tall (28-meter) Spectrum rocket lifted off at 4:12 pm EST (20:12 UTC) Saturday from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway, where it was 10:12 pm local time as the final bluish hues of daylight faded from the late summer sky. “Today, Isar Aerospace opened space from continental Europe,” said Daniel Metzler, the company’s co-founder and CEO, in a press release. “We achieved within a few years what had taken the European space industry decades before,” Metzler continued. The reporter is incredibly proud of their team, that has made this success story from Europe possible.