Isar Aerospace Carbon Fiber Composite Rocket Reaches Orbit

Isar Aerospace (Ottobrunn, Germany) reached orbit on Sept. 5 during the second flight of its Spectrum launch vehicle, deploying satellite payloads and becoming what it says is the first commercial space company from Europe to place satellites into orbit. Spectrum’s primary structure is built as a single carbon fiber composite part produced through an automated manufacturing process, and Multiplast - Groupe Carboman (Vannes, France) has built four 6-meter-long fairings over the past 3 years to equip this launcher, using an innovative process to integrate the heat shield into the composite. Automation, JEC Composites highlighted, is central to the company’s plans to scale toward series production.

Mission “Onward and Upward” lifted off from Isar Aerospace’s launch complex at Andøya Spaceport in Norway at 10:12 p.m. CEST. The two-stage vehicle completed stage separation, second stage ignition, fairing jettison and orbital insertion before deploying its payloads — five CubeSats and one experiment selected through the German Space Agency’s Microlauncher Competition, which is funded through the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Boost! program.

“We achieved within a few years what had taken the European space industry decades before,” says Daniel Metzler, CEO and co-founder of Isar Aerospace. “We will now focus on rapidly scaling launch vehicle production, deliver on our order pipeline and meet surging global demand.”

Composite materials are central to that scale-up. “Thanks to our automated production process, we can easily scale the production of high-performance rocket stages,” Isar Aerospace told JEC Composites, which notes the approach pairs the weight advantages composites offer launch vehicles with a manufacturing process designed for higher production volumes.

Spectrum’s next vehicles, numbered 3 through 7, are already in production. Isar Aerospace is also nearing completion of a 40,000-square-meter integrated production facility near Munich, which the company says will eventually support manufacturing of up to 40 launch vehicles per year, and is building a second launch complex in Nova Scotia, Canada, to serve mid- to high-inclination orbits for Earth observation and communications missions.