Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil

  Russia had to be kept busy, therefore Ukraine proxy war

Also, Syria being in that list is silly. The Syrian opposition aren't vassals of the US. The US was never too keen to help them.

   > Even with the Greenland annexation threats there are Democrats who think it wouldn't be a bad idea, but you should not say it out loud.

This is probably the worst example you could have used to make this point about aggressive US foreign policy having support across party lines. There is absolutely no constituency within the Democrats that have ever wanted this because it came entirely from the fevered mind of Trump and the parody edition of Bush's neocons in the current admin.

The combo of 1. negative polarization and 2. being completely pointless and accomplishing nothing makes this about as unpopular of an idea you could find among Democrats, in public or private.

Iran is also a bad choice to include in your list considering Obama was responsible for the JCPOA.

The only problem with Flat Earthers is that they say things out loud. Also, grabbing other people by their **ies.

A non-reusable launcher that can put small payloads into a Polar orbits only, due to launch site latitude and lack of an orbital bus. It's fairly 1960s stuff.

The United States saves the day. France pretends they are in charge with grand speeches.

I was close to a European immigrant and 2 things she was shocked about:

How rich the United States was. Even our poor had more than her upper middle class family had.

How people in the United States do not take 2 hour coffee and cigarette breaks.

Then, it depends on what you need to do. A 3x cost if you deploy a strategic constellation is fine. A 3x cost if you want to launch huge payloads for a Mars trip (I know costs were for LEO, just giving an example) is probably uncompetitive.

I'm hopeful that SpaceX's success will lead to European companies following in their footsteps and providing some more affordable alternatives to Ariane's current wildly-expensive rockets.

There is a very credible argument to be made that excessive cooperation leads to incredibly heavy overly political programs that are completely static and can't adjust because of international agreements.

That doesn't mean working together isn't good but they way they have been has been pretty questionably in many ways (along with a lot of space policy).

"Power being the only language spoken", never left in the first place in order to get back to it, it's how the world always worked and will always work.

Granted, power wasn't actually the "language spoken", but more accurately it was the stick ensuring the enforcement of the terms agreed within the "language spoken", a lesson as old as time that many in EU forgot after post-USSR collapse and now have to re-learn it, but at a heavy cost and with added interest.

"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it", couldn't be more true.

And people who get wet when France says they are going to send soldiers to Ukraine and it never materializes.

The general population has 0 understanding of international relations. It's the United States and China right now. Any other belief comes from someone who has read 0 international relations Realism books.

Aside from technology, Germany also got major control centers and mission planning capability in Cologne and Oberpfaffenhofen.

Most components are there, but not the political will to go on a national mission.

After the horrors of WWII, Europe decided it would rather do things collectively than each country doing its own thing. This resulted in wonderful things like Concorde, fast rail, Airbus, and Ariane. Europe became more than the sum of its parts.

For any failure you would need to have an ocean in the direction of launch.

Also not all orbits are equal because then you need more fuel etc.

It is silly to say every country has equal opportunity to go to space because space is only 100km up. That’s not how it works.

ESA and ArianeSpace will slowly but surely decay into obsolescence.

A real shame Britain abandoned their own research.

Continental Europe? yes. The Russian's Plesetsk Cosmodrome is well within the boundaries of the European continent.

Continental Europe outside of Russian influence? no.

And of course the original rocket missiles developed by von Braun and used to bomb London.

Yes. A Spanish private company launched the Miura 1 from Huelva (South of Spain) in 2023.

In any case it was programmed to reach only 46 Km high in the first attempt, and suffered damages after landing in the ocean at the expected coordinates.

It seems that a loan to finish its successor, the reusable rocket Miura 5, were granted in April of this year and that its first test flight is expected for the end of 2026, so Germany is not the only European country trying this.

How is Russia a wildcard? What unexpected thing do you think Russia has done?

Good friends you're choosing there.

China has it's own launchers which shows it's decoupling from Europe now. It's over for Europe as countries race to be independent from them.

In fact, after the war the USSR has briefly reconstituted the manufacturing of V-2 in Germany, employing thousands of people, before transplanting this entire industry to the USSR. This dramatically lifted the level of Soviet manufacturing and relevant metallurgy.

von Braun's dissertation was on engine design and testing. But when he built the Redstone missile in the USA, he ordered the engine from a US company -- the engine which was already a generation ahead, compared to the imported German engines which the US engineers studied after the war.

Meanwhile, the Soviets have developed even better engines, completely on their own, though with the important parts built using the materials and the equipment brought from Germany.

So it is debatable whether having the German higher-ups and having a greater continuity with German design philosophy was a good thing or a liability.

It is less well known, but France have also imported a significant number of ex-Peenemunde engineers for their program. And their engines developed in a way different from both the American ones and the Soviet ones -- which definitively shows that although internalizing the German know-how was the starting point for everyone, it did not define the path of subsequent development.

Of course, the engines were not the whole story. The Germans took to the USA the advanced prototypes of the inertial guidance systems which were developed for the missiles that were supposed to come after the V-2. And the Soviets got Helmut Gröttrup. This did have its effects in both cases.

Cutting off aid is terrible, but you don’t get to blame the US for their dying - without blaming the rest of the world as well. That isn’t a US issue.

It looks like he was an angel investor in Isar, and then co-founded a VC firm that continued to invest in Isar: https://alpinespace.vc/

I guess the confusion comes from thinking of "European" as some sort of cultural identity (which frankly doesn't exist, unless you only look at the last hundred years or so, and even that is generous), instead of the people living in the geographical region called "Europe".

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/world/europe/germany-afd-...

It has the same status in France as Alaska does in the US.

>It's also better to have the massive amounts of emissions far away from your own population.

That's the dumbest comment i read since a long time, thanks.

If you said: Americans usually incorrectly think of Western Europe as those countries not partially or fully under control of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, then I’d agree with you.