// ARS TECHNICA — MONDO
Rocket Report: Europe joins the commercial launch club; a Ravn X sighting?
“We felt like now is the time to pour gas on that fire.”
Welcome 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.
Long-forgotten space plane is back? Ars Technica has written precisely one article about Ravn X, an autonomous aircraft and launch vehicle under development by Aevum. This was back in December 2020. We haven’t covered it since, I think it’s safe to say, there is a fair amount of skepticism about whether the project to build the space plane was all that realistic. And time has largely proved us right. The company’s initial target of an orbital mission in 2021 came and went. We largely forgot about the vehicle. Then something mysterious showed up at Long Beach Airport.
Don’t get too excited … TWZ reports that a handful of aviation photographers got a surprise eyeful of a very sleek and large aircraft silhouette last week at the airport and later learned that it was likely a mockup of Ravn X. Later on, in posts on X, Aevum founder Jay Skylus said the company “conducted Test 2 of Ravn X SN0 early this morning. Ravn X completed its first fully autonomous taxi. ~37 minutes of autonomy. We’re reviewing the telemetry and test data now and will share more as soon as I can.” We are not expecting any flights imminently. (submitted by Onychomys)
UK invests big time in northern spaceport. This week, the United Kingdom unveiled a new national space strategy that seeks to “drive growth, strengthen security and back everyday technologies.” As part of efforts to reindustrialize the country, the government is investing 7.8 billion pounds ($10.5 billion) through 2030. About 40 percent of the funding will go toward strengthening connectivity, including the Connectivity in Low Earth Orbit and SKYNET defense communications programs, which “play a pivotal role in keeping our Armed Forces connected wherever they are in the world.”
German rockets to launch from there … The UK government also wants to help