It’s not all bad news from Germany

On Saturday evening, the Spectrum rocket was successfully launched from the Andøya spaceport in Norway. On its second attempt – the first, in March 2025, had ended just thirty seconds after liftoff – the unmanned vehicle managed to reach orbit with its payload, consisting of CubeSat satellites and an experiment to test new technologies in space. Behind the success of the mission, dubbed ‘Onward and Upward’, is the German start-up Isar Aerospace, founded just eight years ago, which has thus made history by becoming the first private European company to send its own launch vehicle into orbit from the European mainland. For Europe’s ambition to achieve autonomy in access to space – and to free itself from dependence on non-European suppliers, foremost among them Elon Musk’s SpaceX – Isar Aerospace’s success represents a significant turning point.

This is how it was described by both the Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA), Josef Aschbacher, and the European Commissioner for Defence and Space, Andrius Kubilius, who, whilst congratulating the company, highlighted the role of European programmes in supporting space start-ups, particularly in the development of launch vehicles. Isar, which following Saturday’s mission plans to commence series production of the Spectrum rocket – the aim being to produce more than thirty per year – and is developing a second launch site in Canada, is in fact supported by the ESA through the ‘boost!’ programme, set up primarily to fund emerging players in space transport. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz himself spoke of the ‘dawn of a new era’; however, having just endured a disastrous election day in Saxony-Anhalt, he has pulled out of the Space Summit in Paris, which begins on Wednesday – an event to which Emmanuel Macron attaches particular importance and which Merz, as leader of Europe’s leading nation in terms of investment in the space sector, was due to co-chair.