Germany launches rocket to carry satellites to orbit in first success in continental Europe

German firm Isar Aerospace has placed its Spectrum rocket into low Earth orbit on its second attempt, becoming the first European company to do so with its own launcher and hitting the first milestone in ESA's European Launcher Challenge. The Spectrum launcher, developed by German company Isar Aerospace, has lifted off from the Andøya spaceport in Norway and placed its payload in low Earth orbit. This is the rocket's second flight, after the first, carried out in 2025, managed only to clear the launch pad for 30 seconds before falling into the sea. Spectrum is 28 metres tall and 2 metres in diameter. It has ten engines, nine on the first stage and one on the second, and is designed to carry payloads of up to 1,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit (LEO). Unlike the first flight, which carried no passengers, this mission, dubbed "Onward and Upward", has included six commercial and educational payloads, among them several CubeSats and an experiment designed to test new technologies in space and give European students hands-on experience. A milestone for the European Launcher Challenge The Director General of the European Space Agency, Josef Aschbacher, described the launch as historic and called it the first time a European launcher-sector competitor has reached orbit. He said that Isar Aerospace, founded just eight years ago, has taken an important step towards a more diverse and autonomous European space sector. The mission has been supported by ESA's Boost! programme, which funds commercial space transport initiatives. Isar Aerospace had already received backing through the agency's Business Incubation Centre and also won the first Microlauncher Competition organised by the German Space Agency (DLR), a contest that determined the selection of the payloads carried on this flight. In 2025, Isar Aerospace was selected, along with other companies, to take part in the European Launcher Challenge, a programme that requires providers to achieve an orbital launch before 2027. With this flight, the company becomes the first to reach that initial programme milestone. Géraldine Naja, ESA's Director of Space Transportation, stressed that this is the first European company to reach orbit with its own launch vehicle and congratulated the teams involved, while noting the expectation of seeing more launches from Andøya in the near future. A rapidly expanding sector Isar Aerospace's achievement comes at a time of momentum for Europe's microlauncher ecosystem, in which companies such as Spain's PLD Space have also begun to secure contracts under the same European Launcher Challenge. At the end of August, ESA signed a 158.9 million euro agreement with the Alicante-based company to increase the launch rate of its MIURA 5 rocket, in a process driven by the same goal: reducing Europe's reliance on foreign launchers to place satellites in orbit.