Europe's first commercial rocket reached orbit on Saturday. The Azores spaceport is still waiting
Isar Aerospace's Spectrum lifted off from Andøya on 5 September and reached orbit around seven minutes later, deploying five CubeSats. Portugal's Santa Maria has the licence and the geography, but no flight yet.
Europe spent years saying it needed to be able to launch for itself. On Saturday it started being able to say that in the past tense.
Spectrum, built by Germany’s Isar Aerospace, lifted off from Andøya in northern Norway and reached orbit around seven minutes later, deploying its payloads there. It was the launcher’s second flight and its first carrying satellites: five CubeSats plus a non-deployable scientific experiment. It is the first orbital flight completed by a privately developed launcher from continental European soil — a sentence with a lot of qualifiers in it, and still a first.
Why this matters from Lisbon
Because the queue to launch is the industry’s bottleneck, and whoever owns a pad owns leverage. Portugal wants to sit on that side of the table with Santa Maria, in the Azores, and the geography is a genuine argument: low latitude, open Atlantic to the south and east, a runway and a tracking station that have been there for decades.
What is missing is the part you cannot fake. It has not flown. The consortium running the spaceport has a contract with Poland’s SpaceForest to launch the Perun suborbital vehicle from Santa Maria, and the reading across the sector after Saturday is blunt: the island needs to put something up this year, even suborbital, before Europe’s spaceport race gets settled without it.
The clock moves faster than the process
Andøya was nobody’s favourite five years ago. What it had was a company willing to build a dedicated pad and a regulator willing to keep up. That is the whole model: the site does not attract the launcher, the launcher validates the site.
Portugal has the structure in place and a space sector already worth €1.2 billion to the economy, with the Portuguese Space Agency coordinating it. What it does not have is the photograph with smoke in it. Until it does, Santa Maria remains a very good place to launch from — and Andøya remains the place someone launched from.
By Oliver Grant
Image: Hoyd / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
