HWBRIEF
The German startup's 95 foot rocket flew on its second attempt, six months after a March 2025 in flight failure and four scrubs.
A private German rocket reached orbit from Western European soil for the first time on Sept. 5, when Isar Aerospace's Spectrum lifted off from Norway's Andøya Space Center at 4:12 p.m. EDT and settled into an elliptical orbit about seven minutes later. The flight is the first orbital launch from Western Europe, and the first carried out by a private company rather than a state agency.
The two-stage, 95-foot (28-meter) vehicle had failed its first flight, "Going Full Spectrum," less than a minute after launch in March 2025. A September 2025 Isar update traced the failure to a vent valve that opened unintentionally, costing the rocket attitude control at the start of its roll maneuver.
Spectrum's second mission, "Onward and Upward," followed the March 2025 crash with four scrubs before today's success. A pressurization valve issue pushed the flight out of January, weather and an intruding boat cost it March, a composite overwrapped pressure vessel leak scrubbed the April 9 attempt, and off-nominal behavior in the vehicle's fluid systems stopped the June 15 stand-down. The European Space Agency framed the flight as Spectrum's qualifying second launch.
Today's payload was five cubesats, small standardized satellites, and one non-deployable scientific experiment. Isar produced the launch webcast in collaboration with NASASpaceflight.