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Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight
- simongray 1y agoThis video contains visits to and interviews with both Isar and another European startup, RFA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRFnGnJzRJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRFnGnJzRJQ I found it quite interesting. They are taking two very different approaches.
- perihelions 1y agoLaunch video with timestamp, https://youtu.be/bykfQ3J4NNc?t=2049 https://youtu.be/bykfQ3J4NNc?t=2049 edit: And different camera angles here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlAgenP2RxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlAgenP2RxM https://tv.vg.no/nyheter/se-den-historiske-rakettoppskytningen?id=327821 https://tv.vg.no/nyheter/se-den-historiske-rakettoppskytning...
- Mistletoe 1y agoWhy does the first video just cut to nothing for the most exciting part, the fall?
- olex 1y agoIt was a live stream, presumably stream operators had instructions to not show the kaboom live on camera, should one occur.
- belter 1y agoGorgeous landscape.
- fifilura 1y agoNorway is like that. Almost everywhere along the coast. Just breathtaking.
- tectonic 1y agoThe first orbital launch attempt from continental Europe, and the first of Europe’s batch of newspace commercial launch startups. I hope they figure out what happened and iterate quickly!
- zamadatix 1y agoI think that should be "first commercial orbital launch attempt from continental Europe". Commercial is required to exclude launches from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, orbital is required to exclude the Miura 1 attempt, Europe is required for obvious reasons & continental is required to exclude the LauncherOne attempt, and attempt is required for obvious reasons.
- rsynnott 1y ago> & continental is required to exclude the LauncherOne attempt Also to exclude a few hundred launches from French Guiana, which is politically part of France and the EU (but certainly not geographically in Europe).
- verzali 1y agoIf you want to get technical, Andoya is an island separated from continental Europe...
- iSnow 1y agoAlso the biggest German rocket since V2.
- shafyy 1y agoOh boy, this launch looks so cool with the all the ice and snowy rocks in the background
- intrasight 1y agoFor sure, the coolest launch setting there has been.
- pmontra 1y agoDays ago I read an interview in which somebody from Isar said that they would be happy to get 30 seconds of flight time. They would learn a lot from the data. It's more or less what happened.
- mertbio 1y ago> CEO and Co-founder Daniel Metzler: “Our first test flight met all our expectations, achieving a great success. We had a clean liftoff, 30 seconds of flight and even got to validate our Flight Termination System. With this result, we feel confident to approach our second flight.” See: https://isaraerospace.com/newsroom-first-test-flight https://isaraerospace.com/newsroom-first-test-flight
- michaeljx 1y agoDoes the flight termination system consist of the rocket free-falling into the ground resulting in a fiery explosion?
- mertbio 1y agoBy just looking at the video, you can see that they cut the engines after the rocket starts tilting. I guess that’s the flight termination system. Also, it didn't fall into the ground, but into the water.
- pc86 1y ago> Also, it didn't fall into the ground, but into the water. Ah yes very important distinction this
- belter 1y agoNormally a flight termination system has explosive charges.
- Gravityloss 1y agoThis is excellent. I didn't realize earlier they were going to fly so soon already. Just now fixes and more flights. I hope the press, voters or investors don't treat the crash as a reason to cut off funding.
- nw05678 1y agoI would love to invest in this.
- toni 1y agoLaunching a rocket from Earth surface looks like such a complex challenge not completely solved, and companies consider a 30-seconds journey a great success. I have sincerely no intention to trivialize this, but would we ever see rockets launched from Moon or low Earth orbit? It seems so inefficient to launch like how we do now.
- vessenes 1y agothere are lots and lots of proposals for doing this more cheaply. Most require megascale engineering, and would be a huge benefit to humanity if we could do it. Some examples -- skyhooks -- large counterweighted swinging things that reach down into upper atmosphere and spin you right round baby right round -- a bunch of gravity assisted momentum ideas where you get the sun or the earth or what have you to get you really going, and then use that momentum to get a little thing up and moving more quickly. Space elevators -- hang a giant heavy thing out off one end, and drop a cable made of uninvented nanoscale tech down to earth, then just, you know, climb. And then there's orbital construction, which requires some .. construction materials. The long standing idea has been to either go out to the asteroids and build there, or bring an asteroid or two here. Both have a lot of problems, and are a long way off. I think it's most likely that human governments will opt not to have the ability to make giant tungsten rods hanging over their countries, and will, to the extent moving an asteroid were ever viable, require they be a long way away, or alternately that we just go to the asteroids and construct elsewhere. We are like maybe a century from all this being viable, and that's if companies like SpaceX keep moving at the clip they've been moving for that century.
- Dylan16807 1y ago> Moon or low Earth orbit Nobody lives there (within rounding error), and shipping in supplies to build rockets costs even more than launching from the ground. Also we can do reusable launches to LEO so it's not all that inefficient.
- jumploops 1y agoAs a software engineer, this might sound like a failure, but launching plus 30s of flight time means a lot of things went right. If you’re curious about commercial launch vehicles, there’s a decent documentary about the challenges these aerospace startups face called Wild Wild Space[0]. Just getting the thing off the ground is a huge milestone. I wish them the best in future launches. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Wild_Space https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Wild_Space
- senko 1y agoThe book the show is based on / related to, When heavens went on sale (by Ashlee Vance) is well worth a read, as are Liftoff and Reentry (by Eric Berger).
- ivan_gammel 1y agoLooks like it was completely successful. They willingly terminated the launch after achieving mission goals.
- impossiblefork 1y agoTilting the rocket didn't work as intended though, so something did go seriously wrong.
- iSnow 1y agoThe rocket started oscillating before. I believe it was pure coincidence that the launch termination system kicked in when they started the pitchover manoeuvre.
- impossiblefork 1y agoYes. I didn't really notice that, but now that you mention it it's very clear.
- olex 1y ago"Completely successful" would've been reaching orbit. They didn't expect to get that far, but this was still a far cry from a complete success. Only milestones cleared are countdown, launch, and stable flight in fixed attitude - which still leaves a lot of big ones on the way to orbit (controlled pitchover, max-Q, stage sep, second stage ignition and operation, payload fairing separation, orbital insertion, payload separation at the very least).
- apples_oranges 1y agoIs this rocket „dual use“?
- perihelions 1y agoIf your enemy is your employer and their launchpad infrastructure—yes! Less jokingly: liquid-fueled rockets aren't very practical weapons, especially ones with cryogenic fuels like liquid oxygen. I highly recommend Clark's Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants for a history of the space and missile races, as understood from the point-of-view of a propellant chemist who worked in them. There's an amazing amount of lost art and lore from the early Cold-war space era, that's no longer relevant in the modern world, except for its sheer entertainment value.
- robocat 1y agoPDF of the book Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants: https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd... Snippet: Came the day of the first trial. The propellants were hydrazine and WENA. We were all gathered around waiting for the balloon to go up, when Uncle Milty warned, "Hold it- the acid valve is leaking!" "Go ahead - fire anyway!" Paul ordered. I looked around and signaled to my own gang, and we started backing gently away, like so many cats with wet feet. Howard Streim opened his mouth to protest, but as he said later, "I saw that dog-eating grin on Doc's face and shut it again," and somebody pushed the button. There was a little flicker of yellow flame, and then a brilliant blue-white flash and an ear-splitting crack. The lid to the chamber went through the ceiling (we found it in the attic some weeks later), the viewports vanished, and some forty pounds of high-grade optical glass was reduced to a fine powder before I could blink. I clasped both hands over my mouth and staggered out of the lab, lo collapse on the lawn and laugh myself sick, and Paul stalked out in a huff. When I tottered weakly back into the lab some hours later I found that my gang had sawed out, carried away, and carefully lost, some four feet from the middle of the table on which the gadget had rested, so that Paul's STIDA could never, never, never be reassembled, in our lab.
- icegreentea2 1y ago
- randomNumber7 1y agoIt also is more environmentally friendly than rockets from other states.
- kensai 1y agoExcellent attempt. The more, the merrier!
- 3ple_alpha 1y agoToo bad all European spaceports seem to be so awkwardly placed for the purpose of spectating launches. Main one in one of the most remote areas of jungle in the world, there's one in Sweden (been focusing on suborbital launches) far to the north where only moose live, now this. Americans are really lucky in that regard.
- simongray 1y agoIf someone built a space port in the Canary Islands that would actually be at a similar latitude to Cape Canaveral, though the latitude of French Guiana is hard to beat (and the Canary Islands are technically part of Africa, not Europe).