WASHINGTON — German launch vehicle company Isar Aerospace has completed tests of its first Spectrum rocket and is ready to launch, pending a license.
The company announced Feb. 21 that it completed a static-fire test of the first stage of Spectrum a week earlier, firing its nine engines for 30 seconds. The company performed a similar test of the rocket’s upper stage in the third quarter of last year.
Those tests confirmed that the rocket is ready, technically. “We are almost ready for the test flight. All we need is the license”, Daniel Metzler, chief executive and co-founder of Isar Aerospace, said in a statement.
Isar plans to launch Spectrum from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway. That launch will take place “as soon as possible” after receiving a launch license from the Norwegian Civil Aviation Authority, which licensed the spaceport last August. The company did not disclose when it expected to get that license, but said the launch period will be determined as part of the licensing process.
Spectrum is designed to place up to 1,000 kilograms into a low Earth orbit and 700 kilograms into a sun-synchronous orbit. It is one of several vehicles under development by European startups, none of which have made it to orbit yet.
The company had previously planned a first launch of Spectrum last year. “We wanted to launch a few months back but we needed to test, and we will continue to test until we feel that we can proceed with a launch,” said Stella Guillen, chief commercial officer of Isar, during a panel at the Smallsat Symposium Feb. 4. “We want this as soon as possible.”
She said the company had developed not just the Spectrum rocket but an infrastructure for producing and testing the rocket at scale, all since its founding in late 2018. Isar’s current factory can build six to eight rockets a year and the company is moving into a larger facility that can build 30 to 40 rockets annually.
“Launching is not easy and we are testing and testing because we are also getting ready for cadence,” she added. “It’s not just we’re launching one time and we’re waiting to see what happens to us.”
Isar has its second and third Spectrum rockets in production ahead of the first launch, which the company has emphasized is a test flight.
“The flight will be the first integrated test of tens of thousands of components”, said Josef Fleischmann, co-founder and chief technology officer of the company, in a statement. “Regardless of how far we get, this first test flight will hopefully generate an enormous amount of data and experience which we can apply to future missions.”
