The history of European space exploration is a long and distinguished one, with many decades and whole families of launch vehicles. It might therefore come as a surprise that despite all this, it’s taken until 2026 for a European rocket to be launched into orbit from European soil rather than from somewhere close to the Equator. The German company Isar Aerospace launched one of their Spectrum rockets from Andøya Space in Norway and deployed its CubeSat payloads to orbit.
The five satellites were a selection of projects from the German space agency’s Microlauncher Competition, which offers the chance of a launch to start-ups and educational institutions. The press release doesn’t name them, but Wikipedia has the following list: TriSat-S (University of Maribor and SkyLabs); FramSat-1 (NTNU SpaceTeam); Sat1 (TU Wien Space Team); CyBEEsat (TU Berlin); Platform 6 (EnduroSat) and Let It Go (experiment, Dcubed).[46].
Interestingly, the company is also working on a space launch facility in Nova Scotia, Canada, to gain access to lower inclination orbits and to provide Canadians with their own launch capability. More is evidently yet to come.
We’ve mentioned Isar before, when we reported on the building of the spaceport.
While EU is busy with cube sats and uni projects, Elon launched an entire global sat network that provides low latency internet. And for to do that his company invented reusable rockets…
You deserve it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJuqBlamd6o
Yeah, all hail Elon! We should all be like him! Well, there’s probably not enough ketamine to go around! /s
You think the rocket and engine design burst full-blown like Athena from his Zeus-like forehead? All built on the existing technology of NASA, Roscosmos and the ESA.
If Elon gets a stroke and becomes a vegetable, the reality distortion field will collapse and probably so will his enterprises because they run as a subsidy/investment scams more than on profitable business.
There’s enough capital in his empire that losing it would trigger a minor depression, probably worldwide. It would count as roughly 10-20% of the size of the subprime mortgage crisis. Musk is the only individual who is approaching the point of being too rich to fail.
I mean… let’s at least give him the electric car, or better put, goading the entrenched incumbent manufacturers to make electric cars again – They’d have never done it otherwise, y’all know it’s true. But the rest of it? ANYWAY Good for the Germans, it’s where it all started. Also, very amusing video.
That Elon sounds like a very sharp dude! We should put him in charge of cutting government waste! We could save billions of dollars and if anyone died as a result, they would be in poor shixhole countries nobody can even find on a map!
Good point, indeed. There’s no doubt that we are a little bit behind over here.
As a German, though, I’m simply genuinely positively surprised by this news and I think it’s still remarkable.
I wouldn’t have thought that we Europeans would still manage something like this in this decade.
I mean we have the Ariane rocket for decades, but that’s a different beast, likely.
Looking back at 20th century I’m kind of glad that this launch had a peaceful, humble start without much fuss.
The focus on university projects or research brings back memories of a time when space exploration meant team work, peace and a better future.
In general, we Europeans have (or used to have) a more, um, romantic vision of space, I guess.
More of a StarTrek-like future, maybe?
Less about big profits or business, which some other nations currently are into?
I mean, sure, these things are pretty important to companies here,
but I think we still have audible voices concerned about the consequences, as well.
Such as a crowded orbit (Kessler syndrome), light pollution or satellites interfering with astronomy and astro-photography.
For example, here in Germany the TV programme “Space Night” from the 90s used to be quite popular.
It was about archived space footage (NASA, ESA etc) with an ambient music playing in background.
It also was combined with some short science programmes in-between, if I remember correctly.
Anyway, last time I checked it still ran in the night programme, as it used to.
That being said, I can’t speak for all my fellow citizens or Europeans in general, of course.
So this comment remains pretty vage, understandably.
My apologies that it is so long, as well. I tried to keep it short.
Europe has been falling behind because the ESA is basically an industrial tug of war between France, Germany and Italy, where each wants to maintain and grow their own aerospace industrial base with the common money allocated to the space program rather than work together for a single economical launch system.
The “fair return” principle means that each state gets contracts according to how much they pay into the system, so projects are not free to choose the cheapest or most efficient suppliers, they’re forced to procure parts and services from those who fund the ESA in proportion to their funding.
For example, when Ariane buys boosters from Italy, they’re also propping up the parallel Italian Vega-C launch system that uses the same boosters and serves a different market segment, and vice versa. This is both a synergy benefit, but also a synergy cost because neither can choose a different supplier or design as they’re mutually locked in to a shared architecture serving two different purposes, so the overall market is less competitive and more politically driven.
Put simply, the point of the system is to maintain demand for every country’s industry, not produce the cheapest or most capable launch vehicles.
I see, thank you for the information! 🙂
Not exactly sure if it’s good or bad, though.
The participing parties seem to have no issue with that model, otherways they would have changed contracts years ago, wouldn’t they? 🤷♂️
SpaceX did pretty good indeed. But crediting that all to Elon is a bit silly. As it took thousands of engineers and a lot of government grants.
I forgot to mention, a few of us are a bit sad about the thought that internet now is available nearly everywhere, all the time, at high speeds.
It’s a bit disturbing that there are almost no internet-free/cellphone-free zones anymore.
It’s a burden to be expected to be connected all the time.
After a long day, some of us just want to retreat from all this stress, log-off, slow down, have privacy.
Why is there now more interest / acceptance of launches at high latitudes?
Because the target orbit is a highly inclined one that sweeps across more ground as it goes around.
For geostationary orbits that put a satellite on top of a particular point on earth, like a TV relay satellite that stays relatively fixed in the sky, you want to launch from the equator to add the rotation of the earth to your orbital velocity.
For a polar orbit that scans across the entire earth as the earth turns around underneath it (e.g. weather/climate observation satellites), you want to launch from the pole so you don’t have to use rocket thrust to cancel the sideways orbital velocity.
For something like Starlink that wants to put the satellites onto highly inclined orbits, the best place would be somewhere in between. Such as Norway. It’s a bit too high for most purposes, but it’s up in the right ballpark.