Europe’s launch challengeby Jeff Foust
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| “We never expected that we would get to orbit,” Metzler said. “We set out to gather data primarily, and that is something that we have successfully achieved.” |
But as is often the case with first launches of new rockets, things did not stay good for long. About 25 seconds after liftoff (the clock on the company’s webcast having inexplicably frozen at T+18 seconds), the rocket began to sway, just after the webcast host said the vehicle was performing a planned pitchover maneuver to gain speed as well as altitude. Several seconds later, the vehicle had pitched over, turning 90 degrees and more, its engines appearing to extinguish. The webcast cut away from the dying rocket, but the audio remained live: about 10 seconds later, viewers could hear, but not see, an explosion.
Spectrum failed to reach orbit, but Isar Aerospace spun the launch as a success nonetheless, saying it became “the first European commercial space company to launch an orbital rocket from Continental Europe.” The launch was a test flight only, with no satellite payloads on board and a goal to simply collect as much flight data as possible.
“We never expected that we would get to orbit,” Daniel Metzler, CEO of Munich-based Isar, said in a call with reporters about four hours after the launch. “We set out to gather data primarily, and that is something that we have successfully achieved. We gathered tons of data, terabytes of data, that we can now analyze.”
Neither he nor Alexandre Dalloneau, the company’s vice president of mission and launch operations, offered any details about what might have gone wrong with the launch, saying they needed to go through the voluminous data first. They did state that the rocket’s flight termination system, which shuts down the engines, worked as planned, allowing the rocket to fall into waters near the pad without any damage to the pad itself (a better outcome than some other first flights of new rockets.)
“Even if I would say the end of the mission was spectacular, I would say—and I insist on that due to my previous experience—it was still a success,” said Dalloneau, who previously handled launches from French Guiana.
The first flight of Spectrum comes as a critical time for Europe and its space industry. Several startups are working on vehicles that would give the continent additional means to get to space, particularly for smaller satellites, but operating in a market dominated by American companies like Rocket Lab and SpaceX. Shifting geopolitics, though, is giving a new urgency for those companies and European governments.
Isar Aerospace is part of a class of European startups looking to reach orbit with their launch vehicles in the coming years. Another German company, Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA), was on track to be the first to do so last year, but it lost the first stage of its RFA ONE rocket in a fire during a static-fire test at SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands last August. It’s hoping to try again later this year.
PLD Space, based in Spain, performed a suborbital test of its Miura 1 rocket in October 2023 and is working on the Miura 5 small launch vehicle that could be ready by the end of the year. Germany company HyImpulse also has plans for suborbital launches as precursors for orbital launches. Other launch startups include Orbex and Skyrora in the United Kingdom and Latitude, MaiaSpace, and Sirius Space Services in France.
| “It feels like Europe thinks it’s 2015 with respect to launch,” Beck said. |
They are entering a market for launching smallsats, with capacities of a couple hundred kilograms up to about a metric ton. That is a market many other companies in the United States and elsewhere have been pursuing, only to suffer technical or financial problems. They also faced competition from Rocket Lab’s Electron, which has become the major small launch vehicle outside of China (which has a vibrant launch ecosystem that is largely isolated from the rest of the world), as well as the low-cost rideshare launches offered by SpaceX.
For Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck, Europe’s pursuit of small launch, among other things, puts the continent behind the times. “It feels like Europe thinks it’s 2015 with respect to launch,” he said in a talk delivered by video at the Smallsat Symposium in Silicon Valley in February. That included the large number of small launchers in development as well as a “reluctance” to attempt reusability and a domain dominated by governments.
“It we roll the clock back to 2015, it feels the same,” he said. “It’s not meant to be a criticism by any stretch, but whenever I go to Europe and talk to colleagues over there, it really feels like I’ve gone back to 2015.”
In a panel later in the day at the conference, executives of European launch companies did interpret Beck’s comment as criticism, but one that was not necessarily off the mark. “Europe is behind, for sure,” said Stella Guillen, chief commercial officer of Isar Aerospace. “It is behind. C’mon, that’s reality.”
“It hasn’t been easy for Europeans to grasp on to the changes to the market, and I think this is the whole reason why Isar exists,” she continued. “We’re trying to catch up.”
“Launch changes rapidly,” said Robert Sproles, CEO of Exolaunch, a Berlin-based company that arranges launches on small launch vehicles and rideshare missions. He noted Europe dominated the commercial launch market for decades with the Ariane family of vehicles before the rise of SpaceX. “Is Europe stuck? No. I’m an optimist. Are we in a little bit of a dip? Perhaps.”
Marino Fragnito, chief commercial officer and launch services director at Avio, which produces and is taking over launch operations of the Vega C, suggested Europe’s large crop of small launch companies will inevitably shrink.
“We have now in Europe a lot of microlauncher programs, and this was the case in 2015 in the US. If we look at what do we have today in the US, the only microlauncher or small launcher is Rocket Lab,” he said.
He added the only company that had really changed the launch market worldwide is SpaceX. “Elon Musk and SpaceX could not have happened in Europe,” he argued, citing an unwillingness by European companies and investors to tolerate many years of losses. “Investors would have killed us after two years.”
Fragnito said on the panel that the current wave of small launch vehicle companies in Europe is linked to government interest in stimulating competition with Arianespace on the large end of the market and Avio at the smaller end. “Probably, and I’m sorry to say that, no one will survive,” he predicted of European microlauncher companies. “Maybe there will be just partnerships, alliances merging; maybe one player will survive. But not three, four, five microlaunchers.”
Europe’s effort to stimulate competition is finally taking shape. At the European Space Summit in Spain in November 2023, ESA announced its intent to hold a competition, or challenge, to support small launch vehicles, while also agreeing to purchase a number of Ariane 6 and Vega C launches to provide a guarantee of government, or institutional demand for those vehicles.
In March 24, the European Space Agency finally released its call for proposals, known as an Invitation To Tender (ITT), for the European Launcher Challenge. The competition will offer two components: one to purchase launch services on small launch vehicles and another to back a “launch service capacity upgrade demonstration” for vehicles.
| “Probably, and I’m sorry to say that, no one will survive,” Fragnito predicted of European microlauncher companies. “Maybe one player will survive. But not three, four, five microlaunchers.” |
ESA will provide up to €169 million ($183 million) to each company, but with a catch. While responses to the ITT are due to ESA in early May, what vehicles will be funded won’t be clear until after ESA’s “CM25” ministerial conference in late November in Germany, where representatives of the agency’s member states meet to agree on what programs to fund and at what level.
A key reason for that is that ESA is using the completion to test an alternative to its “georeturn” policies where countries are guaranteed contracts to their companies in proportion to the size of their financial contribution to them. Instead, ESA will first evaluate the proposals it receives from companies based on their technical merits and business plans.
“Then we will have a bouquet of eligible companies, and we will enter into a dialogue with the member states,” said Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s director of space transportation, at a March 20 briefing, allowing countries to contribute, or subscribe, to the program based on the companies eligible for awards. “We will prepare, based on these proposals, who will be subscribed at CM25.”
He said at the European Space Conference in late January that he expected two or three companies to win funding through the challenge, with the expectation that the selected companies match the ESA award with private funding “in the same order of magnitude.”
While the European Launcher Challenge has been in development for more than a year, shifting geopolitics has brought new attention to the effort. The challenge started when Europe was still grappling with what ESA’s leader, Josef Aschbacher, called a “launcher crisis” that forced his agency and the European Commission to turn to SpaceX for Falcon 9 launches of key science and navigation spacecraft.
That launcher crisis has subsided with the first flights of Ariane 6 and the return to flight of Vega C, but the idea of turning to SpaceX looks even more unpalatable now given worsening relations between the US and Europe, with European perceptions that the US will not always be the staunch ally it had been for decades.
At the March 20 briefing after an ESA Council meeting, ESA announced that its member states had approved a document called Strategy 2040 that included five overarching goals for ESA over the next 15 years, one of which was to strengthen European autonomy and resilience.
“The agency is dedicated to strengthening Europe by addressing the key societal needs of autonomy and resilience,” the document states. “A first key pillar in this regard is having guaranteed autonomous and competitive access to and mobility in space, free from external dependencies.”
Aschbacher said at the briefing that there was a “long discussion” at the ESA Council meeting on “geopolitical aspects that are requiring Europe to be stronger and also more independent.” That discussion, and the goal of autonomy in the strategy, could reshape the package of programs ESA seeks funding for at CM25 in November.
In the call with reporters after the first flight of Spectrum, Isar CEO Metzler also mentioned the need for sovereign European space access. “We’re addressing a critical need for sovereignty and also for flexible access to space out of Europe.”
Isar and the other European startups may benefit from these shifting geopolitics, but ultimately must demonstrate they can reach orbit on a regular basis. They are not there yet, but Metzler believes that they have made progress even with this failure to reach orbit on Sunday. “The team is happy,” he said after the launch. “We cleared the pad, we've gotten about 30 seconds of flight data, so that’s super, super successful.”
He said Isar would hold a big party that night to celebrate the first launch. “It’s a time for people to be proud of, for Europe, frankly, also to be proud of.”
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