The first commercial rocket to be launched from western Europe crashed and burnt in the Norwegian Sea just seconds after takeoff, as the continent struggles to compete in a revitalised space race.
The Spectrum rocket, constructed by the German start-up Isar Aerospace, took off for its maiden flight on Sunday afternoon from the Norwegian spaceport Andoya, in what its makers described as an initial test.
A closely watched live broadcast showed the uncrewed rocket moving upwards in a steep curve immediately after its launch until it started to turn, rotating by 180 degrees and eventually crashing about 30 seconds after blast-off.
Daniel Metzler, Isar Aerospace’s chief executive and co-founder branded, the endeavour “a great success” after the company had stressed that the launch was only a test flight, intended to gather data. “We got to a clean lift-off, 30s of flight and didn’t blow up the pad in the meantime,” Metzler wrote on X.
Sunday’s launch marked the first take-off of an orbital rocket in continental Europe outside Russia and the first that was almost exclusively funded by private sources.
It comes amid fears that the Trump administration could restrict European access to critical US technology, including Starlink, the satellite internet operated and owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, on which Ukraine’s armed forces remain highly dependent.
SpaceX has dominated orbital launches, as private companies move into a sector that was long ruled by public operators. Last year, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets made up 84 per cent of all satellite launches, according to an analysis by the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute.
Europe only accounted for three launches, fewer than India, which notched five and Iran, which managed four.
Between the retirement of its Ariane 5 rocket and last year’s launch of the Ariane 6, the European Space Agency had been fully reliant on SpaceX.
Meanwhile, several countries have increased pressure on Europe by stepping up efforts to leave a mark in space.
China is seeking to land astronauts on the moon by 2030 and India is planning to follow suit by 2040. Turkey founded a space programme in 2018 and is building a spaceport in Somalia in order to complete an unmanned lunar mission by 2026.
Europe is banking on private companies like Isar Aerospace, which is based in the German state of Bavaria, home to 550 companies and 65,000 employees in the sector. Once completed, the Spectrum rocket is expected to carry small- and medium-sized satellites.
The rocket launch in Norway has triggered some optimism. Anna Christmann, the space coordinator for the German government, said that it “marks the beginning of a new era in European space travel”.
The conservative state government of Bavaria had begun its own space programme in 2018, which was ridiculed as a vanity project at the time.
Bavaria is also working on establishing Europe’s largest faculty for aerospace at the Technical University in Munich, from which Isar Aerospace originated. Since its inception in 2018, the company has raised €400 million in funding, including a portion from Nato.
Other European companies are constructing comparable aircraft, including Orbex, in Britain, and Maiaspace in France. The EU announced a €10 billion programme to build a rival to Starlink last December.
