56 Isar Aerospace Spectrum Facts - Orbit from Norway

By Share a Fact Editorial Team · Published September 6, 2026

The Launch on 5 September

Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket lifted off from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway at 22:12 Central European Summer Time on 5 September 2026.
The mission was named Onward and Upward and was Spectrum's second flight.
It was the first time the company had carried customer payloads.
The rocket passed maximum aerodynamic pressure, cut off its main engines, separated its stages and lit the second stage as planned.
It jettisoned its payload fairing after crossing the 100-kilometre Kármán line and before reaching orbital speed.
A circularisation burn placed the upper stage in a Sun-synchronous orbit at roughly 500 kilometres.
The climb to orbit took a little over seven minutes.
Chief executive Daniel Metzler said afterwards that Europe now has sovereign access to space.

The European Commission described it as the first privately developed rocket to reach orbit from continental Europe.
Europe's own Ariane and Vega rockets fly from Kourou in French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America.
Orbital launches from European soil had previously taken place only from Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome, active since 1966, which is why the milestone is usually described as a first for Western Europe.
Spectrum is also the first German-built rocket to reach orbit.
ESA director general Josef Aschbacher called the flight a clear signal of Europe's growing commercial space transportation sector.
The flight completed the first milestone of ESA's European Launcher Challenge, which requires participants to reach orbit.
Isar's first attempt on 30 March 2025 lost control about half a minute after liftoff, so the success came 17 months after that failure.
The Commission said the flight generates the operational data needed to industrialise the launcher.

Spectrum stands 28 metres tall and 2 metres in diameter.
It is a two-stage vehicle with ten engines in total.
The first stage uses nine Aquila engines and the second stage a single vacuum-optimised Aquila.
Each Aquila engine produces about 75 kilonewtons of thrust at sea level.
Both stages burn propane with liquid oxygen.
The second-stage engine can reignite in flight, letting Spectrum place payloads in their target orbits without a separate kick stage.
Spectrum can carry up to 1,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit and about 700 kilograms to a Sun-synchronous orbit.
Isar says about 80 percent of the rocket is manufactured in-house.

Five CubeSats and one non-separating experiment rode on the flight.
CyBEEsat was built at TU Berlin.
TriSat-S came from the University of Maribor in Slovenia.
FramSat-1 is a student satellite from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU.
SpaceTeamSat1 was built by the TU Wien Space Team in Austria.
Platform 6 belongs to the satellite manufacturer EnduroSat.
The non-separating experiment, Let It Go, came from the German company Dcubed.
The payloads were selected after Isar won the first Microlauncher Competition run by the German Space Agency at DLR, ESA's Boost! programme funded the flight, and Exolaunch integrated the satellites into its EXOpod Nova deployer in Berlin.

Spectrum's maiden flight, Going Full Spectrum, lifted off at 12:30 Central European Time on 30 March 2025 after weather delays from 24 March.
About 18 seconds in, the thrust vector control system began over-correcting.
Roughly ten seconds later all first-stage engines shut down, and the rocket fell back near the pad and exploded.
The launch pad itself was not damaged.
The company later traced the loss of attitude control to a vent valve that opened unexpectedly.
Metzler called the roughly 30-second flight a success, saying it validated a clean liftoff and the flight termination system.
Isar had already begun building its second and third rockets before the first one flew.
The second flight was scrubbed on 21 January 2026 because of a pressurisation valve and aborted on 25 March 2026 when a fishing vessel entered the danger zone three seconds before liftoff.
Two more scrubs followed, for a leaking composite pressure vessel on 9 April 2026 and off-nominal fluid-system behaviour on 15 June 2026.

Isar Aerospace was founded in March 2018 by Daniel Metzler, Markus Brandl and Josef Fleischmann.
It is headquartered in Ottobrunn, near Munich.
Early backers included Bulent Altan, a former SpaceX executive, and later Porsche SE and the NATO Innovation Fund.
The company has raised more than 400 million euros in total.
It employed more than 400 people by 2024.
Isar won the European Innovation Council's 10-million-euro Horizon Prize for low-cost space launch in 2022.
In August 2026 ESA signed a European Launcher Challenge contract worth 197.8 million euros with the company.

Andøya Space, founded in 1962, has launched more than 1,200 sounding and sub-orbital rockets from the island.
The orbital spaceport at Nordmela was formally opened by Crown Prince Haakon of Norway on 2 November 2023.
Isar signed a 20-year exclusive lease for the first pad in April 2021, and the site was built to its specifications.
Andøya's position at about 69 degrees north makes it well suited to polar and Sun-synchronous orbits.
Isar also holds access to the former Diamant pad at the Guiana Space Centre and signed a ten-year agreement with Spaceport Nova Scotia in Canada in July 2026.
ESA preselected five companies for its European Launcher Challenge in July 2025: Isar Aerospace, MaiaSpace, Orbex, PLD Space and Rocket Factory Augsburg.
ESA member states doubled the challenge's funding to about 900 million euros at the Bremen ministerial council in November 2025.
Rocket Factory Augsburg received 186.9 million euros and PLD Space 158.9 million euros in the first round of contracts.