Welcome to Edition 9.10 of the Rocket Report! This week we celebrate a historic moment in Europe when a German rocket company, Isar Aerospace, successfully put its launch vehicle into orbit. Founded in 2018 by three students at a German university, Isar Aerospace became the first purely commercial European company to reach orbit, doing so on its second launch attempt. How quickly can they scale up operations? How quickly will the second European launch firm reach this goal? Big questions, which for now we don’t have answers to.

Private capital emerges … It took eight years for Isar to get to orbit, a timetable similar to other successful commercial rocket startups in the West. In that time, the company raised roughly $1 billion through several private financing rounds and now has a workforce of nearly 500 employees. European space officials hope a jolt of competition will light a fire under the continent’s rocket industry. European governments are accustomed to footing the bill and having a say in where rockets are built, a procurement model known as geographical return, or geo-return. The paradigm is different with companies like Isar, which established themselves on a privately funded basis, with ambitions to eventually attract commercial and government business.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.