SPECTRUM — Germany The Spectrum is a two stage launcher being developed by a startup in Munich named Isar Aerospace, which takes its name from a river that flows through Bavaria. So they are not far from their rivals Rocket Factory Augsburg, and the two may end up launching out of the same little spaceport on the island of Andøya in Norway, though for the short term RFA is going with SaxaVord on the island of Unst, Scotland. I don’t know which of the two is more remote — Andøya is way north of the Arctic Circle, but Unst requires crossing a lot more ocean. Since Trump got back into power, and Musk started contaminating SpaceX with Nazi vibes, every politician in Europe is suddenly a whole lot more eager to have their own access to space that’s independent of the superpowers. They already got bitten once by using Soyuz launch services, and they don’t want to go through it again with Falcons, or any other American rocket. The word “sovereign” is suddenly very popular in aerospace circles. So the EU is allocating funds for European companies to compete for. The Spectrum is not too bad a place to start, as it can handle a whole ton, and the RFA-1 should be able to do a ton and a half. It’s obviously going to be a while before anything other than the Ariane 6 can handle big loads. The rocket itself is generic by modern standards, with just one remarkable feature, which is that the fuel is propane. Their stated reason for this is its “density specific impulse”... and I’m not sure what that exactly means but it may mean that they chose it for having a higher exhaust velocity than kerosene while using a smaller and lighter tank than liquid methane. It burns pretty cleanly too, and should not be as difficult to ignite in a vacuum as lighter gases. And it won’t need lots of extra purification like kerosene does... but it does burn hotter than methane, meaning you need tougher engine materials. They named their engine “Aquila”. Like plenty of other recent rockets, including RFA’s design, the first stage has nine engines and the second has one. As far as I can tell, these engines are conventional gas generators. (Why don’t we see rockets with seven engines instead of nine? That would probably be a better balance between lower and upper stage thrust needs. The only seven engine designs we’ve heard about are the Tianlong and the New Glenn... and the Tianlong in its initial version only has three engines instead of the seven they talked about, and the New Glenn does not use the same engine, or even the same fuel, on the second stage.) Isar says the engine has high pressure. The second stage engine is restartable. They use a lot of 3D printing, and like Rocket Lab they put together their large fuselage parts with an automated carbon fiber process. The tanks are bare carbon fiber with no metallic lining, which sounds similar to Rocket Lab. Like SpaceX, their engineering approach is to iterate a lot and try to fail early. This requires a fully in-house approach that contrasts with RFA’s off-the-shelf strategy. They’ve been described as much more secretive than RFA. The fairing size is two meters and the capacity is one ton — a very popular size with rocket builders these days, though in recent decades not a lot of satellites are that size. Peter Beck of Rocket Lab argues that this is not a good size choice, being too big for most small sats but too small to share, but it does seem like sats in this size range are starting to become more common. They intended to launch in 2023, but we’d heard that song before. They got their rocket to the Andøya pad in March 2025. After one scrub for high winds, they sent it... it climbed rather slowly, started wobbling side to side, and after about twenty seconds, it tipped over. They shut down the engines and it hit the water, making a fireball. They plan to be launching from the ESA’s Guyana spaceport later, like the Vega. That would be the place for launching into equatorial inclinations, despite the inconvenience of shipping stuff there. Andøya is of course much more convenient, but usable for polar inclinations only. Spectrum: mass unknown, diam 2.00 m, thrust unknown, imp unknown, gas generator (propane), payload 1.0 t, cost hopefully $12M/t, record 0/1/0.