Capital from NATO and Porsche

8:49 p.m.: According to the company, Isar Aerospace has completed a financing round of 250 million euros. Investors also include Porsche and NATO. A 40,000 square meter production site is scheduled to open in Parsdorf this year, and five more rockets are already in the works. In the long term, the company plans to mass produce up to 40 rockets per year.

Isar Aerospace is supposed to compete with Elon Musk

8:43 p.m.: There is a lot at stake in the mission and the pressure is enormous. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been carrying European satellites into orbit for years. But SpaceX demands that the “fellow flyers” provide the US company with extensive data about their projects.

The second attempt follows around a year after the false start

8:32 p.m.: We will accompany the launch of Isar Aerospace’s “Onward and Upward” mission here. The first launch took place just over a year ago, on March 30, 2025, and ended in failure: around 30 seconds after takeoff, the Spectrum crashed and exploded in the sea. The cause was a loss of attitude control due to bending movements of the rocket during launch, which had not previously been modeled correctly. In addition, a vent valve had not been closed.

The German rocket manufacturer Isar Aerospace wants to launch another rocket from the Norwegian spaceport Andøya this Wednesday evening. The launch window for the “Onward and Upward” mission opens at 9 p.m. Central European Time – subject to suitable weather conditions, said the company from Ottobrunn in Upper Bavaria.

Rocket from Isar Aerospace is to transport payload for the first time

The start was originally planned for Monday but was postponed due to unfavorable wind conditions. Now the rocket is supposed to transport payload for the first time. Five small satellites and an experiment will fly with it.

The startup announced last year that it had received orders from the EU and the European Space Agency Esa for two missions for a Dutch and a French company – and announced launches for this year. The rocket startup based just outside Munich sees this paving the way for future institutional launches on board the “Spectrum” carrier rocket.

First flight only lasted 30 seconds

The rocket’s first test flight at the end of March 2025 lasted just 30 seconds before the rocket crashed. The company said the flight was then aborted and the rocket fell into the sea in a controlled manner. However, the two planned launches on behalf of Europe are not tests, but rather commercial flights with payload. The Dutch customer Isispace is a satellite manufacturer, the French company Infinite Orbits has developed a remote-controlled maintenance system for other satellites.