From the article:
Europe is on the cusp of a new dawn in commercial space technology. As global political tensions intensify and relationships with the US become increasingly strained, several European companies are now planning to conduct their own launches in an attempt to reduce the continent’s reliance on American rockets.
In the coming days, Isar Aerospace, a company based in Munich, will try to launch its Spectrum rocket from a site in the frozen reaches of Andøya island in Norway. A spaceport has been built there to support small commercial rockets, and Spectrum is the first to make an attempt.
“It’s a big milestone,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and spaceflight expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. “It’s long past time for Europe to have a proper commercial launch industry.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/20/1113582/europe-is-finally-getting-serious-about-commercial-rockets/?utm_medium=tr_social&utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=site_visitor.unpaid.engagement
2 Comments
Well yea, once folks got over listening the the experts telling them that Musk was just a nutcase with more dollars than sense who was going to go broke chasing an impossible dream, they’re suddenly trying to make up a decade of lead time.
Interesting article, but be warned… 5 popups!
Also, could some ELI5 to me the following paragraph?
>Increasingly, says McDowell, companies want to place satellites into sun-synchronous orbit, a type of polar orbit where a satellite orbiting Earth stays in perpetual sunlight. This is useful for solar-powered vehicles. “By far the bulk of the commercial market now is sun-synchronous polar orbit,” says McDowell. “So having a high-latitude launch site that has good transport links with customers in Europe does make a difference.”
I thought that the biggest market in the coming years is for LEO telecoms, where they want global coverage and a sun-synchronous polar orbit will not be enough?