Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight

The first orbital launch attempt from continental Europe, and the first of Europe’s batch of newspace commercial launch startups. I hope they figure out what happened and iterate quickly!

zamadatix• 1 year ago

I think that should be "first commercial orbital launch attempt from continental Europe".

Commercial is required to exclude launches from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, orbital is required to exclude the Miura 1 attempt, Europe is required for obvious reasons & continental is required to exclude the LauncherOne attempt, and attempt is required for obvious reasons.

verzali• 1 year ago

If you want to get technical, Andoya is an island separated from continental Europe...

rsynnott3• 1 year ago

& continental is required to exclude the LauncherOne attempt

Also to exclude a few hundred launches from French Guiana, which is politically part of France and the EU (but certainly not geographically in Europe).

iSnow3• 1 year ago

Also the biggest German rocket since V2.

shafyy• 1 year ago

Oh boy, this launch looks so cool with the all the ice and snowy rocks in the background

intrasight• 1 year ago

For sure, the coolest launch setting there has been.

pmontra• 1 year ago

Days ago I read an interview in which somebody from Isar said that they would be happy to get 30 seconds of flight time. They would learn a lot from the data. It's more or less what happened.

mertbio2• 1 year ago

CEO and Co-founder Daniel Metzler: “Our first test flight met all our expectations, achieving a great success. We had a clean liftoff, 30 seconds of flight and even got to validate our Flight Termination System. With this result, we feel confident to approach our second flight.”

See: https://isaraerospace.com/newsroom-first-test-flight

michaeljx• 1 year ago

Does the flight termination system consist of the rocket free-falling into the ground resulting in a fiery explosion?

mertbio2• 1 year ago

By just looking at the video, you can see that they cut the engines after the rocket starts tilting. I guess that’s the flight termination system. Also, it didn't fall into the ground, but into the water.

belter2• 1 year ago

Normally a flight termination system has explosive charges.

mrtksn• 1 year ago

The CEO said that it didn't blew up the pad: https://x.com/danielmetzler/status/1906307777242275881

I don't see why would you detonate the rocket if it doesn't pose danger to just fall down. Probably its also easier to collect the debris.

mlindner• 1 year ago

I've read a lot about this from at least the United States perspective. The rocket wasn't launched from the United States, but the FAA requirements on flight termination is the ceasing of thrust and removing "energy" from the vehicle by rupturing tanks if they pose a danger. The primary thing that's trying to be prevented by flight termination systems is damage/danger to uninvolved parties. So if it's low to the ground simply shutting off the engines is a perfectly fine solution to the issue. If its higher then rupturing the tanks will be needed as it's likely going to land outside the safety area.

ck2• 1 year ago

"that explosion wasn't a failure, it was an experiment rich with data"

   - Neil deGrasse Tyson

IshKebab• 1 year ago

Certainly a glass half full way of looking at it.

Gravityloss• 1 year ago

This is excellent. I didn't realize earlier they were going to fly so soon already. Just now fixes and more flights. I hope the press, voters or investors don't treat the crash as a reason to cut off funding.

nw05678• 1 year ago

I would love to invest in this.

toni• 1 year ago

Launching a rocket from Earth surface looks like such a complex challenge not completely solved, and companies consider a 30-seconds journey a great success.

I have sincerely no intention to trivialize this, but would we ever see rockets launched from Moon or low Earth orbit? It seems so inefficient to launch like how we do now.

vessenes• 1 year ago

there are lots and lots of proposals for doing this more cheaply. Most require megascale engineering, and would be a huge benefit to humanity if we could do it.

Some examples -- skyhooks -- large counterweighted swinging things that reach down into upper atmosphere and spin you right round baby right round -- a bunch of gravity assisted momentum ideas where you get the sun or the earth or what have you to get you really going, and then use that momentum to get a little thing up and moving more quickly. Space elevators -- hang a giant heavy thing out off one end, and drop a cable made of uninvented nanoscale tech down to earth, then just, you know, climb.

And then there's orbital construction, which requires some .. construction materials. The long standing idea has been to either go out to the asteroids and build there, or bring an asteroid or two here. Both have a lot of problems, and are a long way off. I think it's most likely that human governments will opt not to have the ability to make giant tungsten rods hanging over their countries, and will, to the extent moving an asteroid were ever viable, require they be a long way away, or alternately that we just go to the asteroids and construct elsewhere.

We are like maybe a century from all this being viable, and that's if companies like SpaceX keep moving at the clip they've been moving for that century.

Dylan16807• 1 year ago

Moon or low Earth orbit

Nobody lives there (within rounding error), and shipping in supplies to build rockets costs even more than launching from the ground.

Also we can do reusable launches to LEO so it's not all that inefficient.

notahacker• 1 year ago

would we ever see rockets launched from Moon or low Earth orbit?

You need the rocket to get to LEO or the moon. Once you're actually in LEO your propulsion system needs relatively little thrust, but you've replaced a moderately hard problem of launching from earth with a much bigger one of assembling things in orbit using material that's already there...

panick21_4• 1 year ago

Why would we launch from the moon to LEO, we are building sats (and humans) on the earth?

Assuming you mean getting materials from the moon, such as ice, the problems is that it would take 100s of billion in investment on the moon to do that practically. Everything from mining robots, transport and launch infrastructure. Plus infrastructure in LEO to refine that stuff.

If you do the math, assuming you have something like Starship, for those 100 billion to pay for itself, you likely would require an absolute absurd amount of materials from the moon. And on earth we have all the materials, refining capabilities and so on. Far, far cheaper to just launch it from earth in its final required form.

Unless you really want to build a fleet of inter-generational spaceship to explore the outersolar system, this is unlikely going to be make sense.

If you really, really want to transport stuff from the moon to LEO (for some reason), as long as it is basically ice, then its better to use some kind of mass accelerator.

panick21_4• 1 year ago

Why? Rocket companies are a horrible investment and almost all of them fail. The small rocket market is tiny, and requires huge investment. Pretty much all companies have given up on that market completely and are moving to bigger rockets.

RocketLab is still flying electron, but they never produced much profit from it and are themselves moving to a bigger rocket.

jumploops• 1 year ago

As a software engineer, this might sound like a failure, but launching plus 30s of flight time means a lot of things went right.

If you’re curious about commercial launch vehicles, there’s a decent documentary about the challenges these aerospace startups face called Wild Wild Space[0].

Just getting the thing off the ground is a huge milestone. I wish them the best in future launches.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Wild_Space

ivan_gammel2• 1 year ago

Looks like it was completely successful. They willingly terminated the launch after achieving mission goals.

impossiblefork2• 1 year ago

Tilting the rocket didn't work as intended though, so something did go seriously wrong.

olex2• 1 year ago

"Completely successful" would've been reaching orbit. They didn't expect to get that far, but this was still a far cry from a complete success. Only milestones cleared are countdown, launch, and stable flight in fixed attitude - which still leaves a lot of big ones on the way to orbit (controlled pitchover, max-Q, stage sep, second stage ignition and operation, payload fairing separation, orbital insertion, payload separation at the very least).

senko• 1 year ago

The book the show is based on / related to, When heavens went on sale (by Ashlee Vance) is well worth a read, as are Liftoff and Reentry (by Eric Berger).

apples_oranges• 1 year ago

Is this rocket „dual use“?

perihelions3• 1 year ago

If your enemy is your employer and their launchpad infrastructure—yes!

Less jokingly: liquid-fueled rockets aren't very practical weapons, especially ones with cryogenic fuels like liquid oxygen. I highly recommend Clark's Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants for a history of the space and missile races, as understood from the point-of-view of a propellant chemist who worked in them. There's an amazing amount of lost art and lore from the early Cold-war space era, that's no longer relevant in the modern world, except for its sheer entertainment value.

icegreentea22• 1 year ago

To be specific, the challenge with cryogenic fuels is that you can't really keep the rocket fueled up all the time, so you need to spend a bunch of time fueling up the rocket, reducing the responsiveness of the system.

There were generations of hypergolic liquid fueled ICBMs. Those are typically pretty reasonably responsive (and reliable). Unfortunately the fuel is toxic as hell.

Europe does have native solid booster capability. The Vega-C has solid rocket motors for the first 3 stages for example. Very crudely looking at sizes, the 2nd and 3rd stages of a Vega-C should more or less approximate a typical ICBM.

robocat• 1 year ago

PDF of the book Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants:

https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...

Snippet:

  Came the day of the first trial. The propellants were hydrazine and WENA. We were all gathered around waiting for the balloon to go up, when Uncle Milty warned, "Hold it- the acid valve is leaking!"

  "Go ahead - fire anyway!" Paul ordered.

  I looked around and signaled to my own gang, and we started backing gently away, like so many cats with wet feet.

  Howard Streim opened his mouth to protest, but as he said later, "I saw that dog-eating grin on Doc's face and shut it again," and somebody pushed the button. There was a little flicker of yellow flame, and then a brilliant blue-white flash and an ear-splitting crack. The lid to the chamber went through the ceiling (we found it in the attic some weeks later), the viewports vanished, and some forty pounds of high-grade optical glass was reduced to a fine powder before I could blink.

  I clasped both hands over my mouth and staggered out of the lab, lo collapse on the lawn and laugh myself sick, and Paul stalked out in a huff. 

  When I tottered weakly back into the lab some hours later I found that my gang had sawed out, carried away, and carefully lost, some four feet from the middle of the table on which the gadget had rested, so that Paul's STIDA could never, never, never be reassembled, in our lab.

panick21_4• 1 year ago

All rockets are "dual use" in theory. Lots of the technology, such as guidance and so on, is the same. But this rocket is about as far on the 'launch sats to orbit' side as you can build a rocket.

randomNumber7• 1 year ago

It also is more environmentally friendly than rockets from other states.

kensai• 1 year ago

Excellent attempt. The more, the merrier!

3ple_alpha• 1 year ago

Too bad all European spaceports seem to be so awkwardly placed for the purpose of spectating launches. Main one in one of the most remote areas of jungle in the world, there's one in Sweden (been focusing on suborbital launches) far to the north where only moose live, now this. Americans are really lucky in that regard.

simongray3• 1 year ago

If someone built a space port in the Canary Islands that would actually be at a similar latitude to Cape Canaveral, though the latitude of French Guiana is hard to beat (and the Canary Islands are technically part of Africa, not Europe).

rsynnott3• 1 year ago

Morocco might also not be very happy with this. Generally, your ideal site for equatorial launches has ~nothing to the east, for a long way. There's a reason that ESA uses the (on the face of it ridiculously inconvenient) French Guiana facility.

simongray3• 1 year ago

This video contains visits to and interviews with both Isar and another European startup, RFA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRFnGnJzRJQ

I found it quite interesting. They are taking two very different approaches.

Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight

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