Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight

Tilting the rocket didn't work as intended though, so something did go seriously wrong.

"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).

By 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.

Normally a flight termination system has explosive charges.

The CEO said that it didn't blew up the pad: https://x.com/danielmetzler/status/1906307777242275881

I don't see why would you detonate the rocket if it doesn't pose danger to just fall down. Probably its also easier to collect the debris.

I've read a lot about this from at least the United States perspective. The rocket wasn't launched from the United States, but the FAA requirements on flight termination is the ceasing of thrust and removing "energy" from the vehicle by rupturing tanks if they pose a danger. The primary thing that's trying to be prevented by flight termination systems is damage/danger to uninvolved parties. So if it's low to the ground simply shutting off the engines is a perfectly fine solution to the issue. If its higher then rupturing the tanks will be needed as it's likely going to land outside the safety area.

Norway is like that.

Almost everywhere along the coast.

Just breathtaking.

It was a live stream, presumably stream operators had instructions to not show the kaboom live on camera, should one occur.

If you want to get technical, Andoya is an island separated from continental Europe...

> & 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).

Morocco might also not be very happy with this. Generally, your ideal site for equatorial launches has ~nothing to the east, for a long way. There's a reason that ESA uses the (on the face of it ridiculously inconvenient) French Guiana facility.

there 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.

> 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.

> would we ever see rockets launched from Moon or low Earth orbit?

You need the rocket to get to LEO or the moon. Once you're actually in LEO your propulsion system needs relatively little thrust, but you've replaced a moderately hard problem of launching from earth with a much bigger one of assembling things in orbit using material that's already there...

Why would we launch from the moon to LEO, we are building sats (and humans) on the earth?

Assuming you mean getting materials from the moon, such as ice, the problems is that it would take 100s of billion in investment on the moon to do that practically. Everything from mining robots, transport and launch infrastructure. Plus infrastructure in LEO to refine that stuff.

If you do the math, assuming you have something like Starship, for those 100 billion to pay for itself, you likely would require an absolute absurd amount of materials from the moon. And on earth we have all the materials, refining capabilities and so on. Far, far cheaper to just launch it from earth in its final required form.

Unless you really want to build a fleet of inter-generational spaceship to explore the outersolar system, this is unlikely going to be make sense.

If you really, really want to transport stuff from the moon to LEO (for some reason), as long as it is basically ice, then its better to use some kind of mass accelerator.

To be specific, the challenge with cryogenic fuels is that you can't really keep the rocket fueled up all the time, so you need to spend a bunch of time fueling up the rocket, reducing the responsiveness of the system.

There were generations of hypergolic liquid fueled ICBMs. Those are typically pretty reasonably responsive (and reliable). Unfortunately the fuel is toxic as hell.

Europe does have native solid booster capability. The Vega-C has solid rocket motors for the first 3 stages for example. Very crudely looking at sizes, the 2nd and 3rd stages of a Vega-C should more or less approximate a typical ICBM.

PDF of the book Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants:

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.