German company set for first commercial rocket launch from Europe | Hacker News Reader

German company set for first commercial rocket launch from Europe

msn.com

98 pointsmpweiher29 comments

Note:

It is expected that this rocket will explode and reaching orbit is not planned. The company said getting at least 30 seconds of flight time would be nice. Their only goal is to collect as much data as they can in this first flight.

(German) https://www.heise.de/news/Vor-Isar-Aerospace-Testflug-Die-Ra...

> It is expected that this rocket will explode and reaching orbit is not planned

As far as I understand, reaching orbit is actually planned, it's just not expected to get it right on the first try.

PLD space already launched in 2023: https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/spains-pld-space-la...

although their next launches will be from french guiana

Yeah, it looks like the article shortened out "to space" from the context (that previous launch intended to but fell short).

The article talks about the first orbital rocket, while Miura 1 was a suborbital rocket, not capable of reaching orbit (but capable of "reaching space" which means going up and then immediately falling down to Earth, like any suborbital rocket). There's a big difference between reaching orbit and "reaching space" with a suborbital flight. For example, suborbital New Shepard reaches a max speed of 3568 km/h, while to get to orbit, a rocket must accelerate to something around 25000 km/h.

Miura 1 was not only suborbital, it even failed to pass the Karman line (by a wide margin) to reach space in any capacity at all in the previous launch attempt. It only made it 46 km, the design capacity is for up to 150 km, and space is generally considered 100 km.

This (new) rocket may get to claim to be the first commercial European rocket to reach space at all on top of the same for an orbital rocket in one go.

AFAIK there will be no official live stream but updates during the launch on their website: https://www.isaraerospace.com/newsroom-first-test-flight

>600 rockets have been launched from the Esrange Space Center near Kiruna, Sweden since 1966.

https://sscspace.com/esrange/

Isn't that owned by the Swedish government ?

the space center no, and in general not the rockets

https://sscspace.com/esrange/

> Esrange, owned and operated by Swedish Space Corporation (...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Space_Corporation

> Company type: Government-owned

So, Esrange is government-owned, but the company that makes the rocket is private.

There is also the first object in space. But this was arguably no commercial launch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MW_18014

The article talks about the first orbital rocket to be launched from Europe. The title is not very precise, but orbital rockets are the only ones that matter anyway.

The same location (Andøya, Norway) has also launched over 1,200 sounding and sub-orbital rockets of various configurations since 1962.

As others have explained, the news here is a rocket reaching orbit

They’re not far along in their development, but this announcement probably heavily hits a nerve with investors (including governments) right now.

Whats the cost per kg into space? How does that compare to something like Space X?

>Whats the cost per kg into space? How does that compare to something like Space X?

It is a test , so there are no prices we could use to compare. Also Europe will need to continue to invest in local rocket companies since it is important for defence and also not depend on the whims of a self declared enemy and should I dare say it here ... yeah, a fascist that controls the USA president

found some data.

2010-2020s: Competition and pricing pressure Launch Vehicle Payload cost per kg Ariane 5G $9,167 Long March 3B $4,412 Proton $4,320 Falcon 9 $2,720

looks like it would have to hit at least 1/2 price to be competitive with the non-reuse rockets from other countries.

From EU or are Russian launches not from Europe ?

Do they have a commercial (non-state entity) which has actually performed a space launch?

Ariane is launched by a subsidiary of Airbus.

Airbus has significant (at least 25% last I looked) state ownership by various European governments. They did the development, the launching is done by Arianespace which is half owned by Safran (which is also part owned by France). That combined with the Ariane programs themselves being initiated and funded by the ESA makes it a much weaker claim to be a commercial rocket launch.

It's going to be hard to find a space rocket company which has 0% state involvement (e.g. Isar Aerospace and SpaceX have also accepted some amount of funding through venture rounds or contracts one way or the other at some point which can be traced back to governments, or purchased use of government launch facilities) by nature of "why wouldn't you accept a government launch at some point if you've already built a cost efficient rocket" or the like... but I think it's fair for Isar to claim to be launching the first commercial European space rocket since the program to build the rocket wasn't initiated by a state space agency or fulfilling a state agency contract by doing the initial flight.

Not only Airbus though. 74% of Arianespace is owned by ArianeGroup, which is 50% Airbus and 50% Safran.

Russia launches from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, which is in Asia (per the traditional Europe-Asia boundary of the Ural river).

Also, most EU launches are from French Guiana, which is a part of France and therefore a part of the EU, so there have been commercial space launches from the EU(the polity), just not from Europe(the landmass).

Russia has the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Europe and has launched from there before (and is still active), just not via commercial launch provider AFAIK.

Russia also used to launch french guiana.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_at_the_Guiana_Space_Cent...

Was nice having world peace from a NATO's point of view in 2011-2013.

Russian launches continued till third wave of Ukraine territory conflicts in 2022, says wikipedia.

The nice thing is that even today, some American astronauts are flying to the ISS from Russia on Russian rockets, and some Russian astronauts are flying from the USA on American rockets. They're doing that for redundancy of getting their people to space, and for the general cooperation.

What did Russia/USSR pick Kazakhstan at the launching point? Was it the closest they can get to the equator?

The place was originally selected because of the combination of several factors:

- Closeness to the equator.

- Ease of access by rail.

- Lack of populated/foreign areas at the path of falling booster stages.

- Relative closeness to production centers.

- Far enough from borders and small population around the site to make spying harder (remember that in the early days it was also an ICBM launch site).

Other central Asian Soviet republics were farther south, but much worse on the other factors.

Russia simply continues to use it because of the existing infrastructure and tries to gradually move its civilian space program to the new Vostochny Cosmodrome.

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