The First Spacecraft Launched To Orbit From Europe

The history of European space exploration is a long and distinguished one, with many decades and whole families of launch vehicles. It might therefore come as a surprise that despite all this, it’s taken until 2026 for a European rocket to be launched into orbit from European soil rather than from somewhere close to the Equator. The German company Isar Aerospace launched one of their Spectrum rockets from Andøya Space in Norway and deployed its CubeSat payloads to orbit.

The five satellites were a selection of projects from the German space agency’s Microlauncher Competition, which offers the chance of a launch to start-ups and educational institutions. The press release doesn’t name them, but Wikipedia has the following list: TriSat-S (University of Maribor and SkyLabs); FramSat-1 (NTNU SpaceTeam); Sat1 (TU Wien Space Team); CyBEEsat (TU Berlin); Platform 6 (EnduroSat) and Let It Go (experiment, Dcubed).[46].

Interestingly, the company is also working on a space launch facility in Nova Scotia, Canada, to gain access to lower inclination orbits and to provide Canadians with their own launch capability. More is evidently yet to come.

We’ve mentioned Isar before, when we reported on the building of the spaceport.