News Isar Aerospace starts production

Urwumpe

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A German company is starting to build small launchers, planned first launch is next year. The production plant was opened yesterday by the Bavarian minister president Söder in Ottobrunn, near Munich. The start-up is completely private funded (including a former SpaceX investor) and has 100 employees now.

The launch vehicle is called Spectrum, is a TSTO, will be 27m long and should launch 1000 kg of payload into LEO (or 700 kg to SSO). The engines are developed and produced in-house, the engine family is named Aquila, and are supposed to be using light hydrocarbons (gasoline or LNG) and oxygen as propellants. The first stage should be using nine Aquila engines, the second stage a single vacuum optimized version of the Aquila. Otherwise, very little is known about the rocket. The thrust is stated as 675 kN, without any further qualification if this is vacuum thrust, maximum thrust or take-off thrust. At least this limits the maximum liftoff mass to about 50 tons. The rocket design does not look like any kind of reusability is planned, it is very conventional.

The launch site is still undecided, but many German companies are behind a proposal to build a launch site at the North Sea coast to reach polar orbits from German soil.




Generally, I am not really convinced the timeline will work out, since the company on one hand tries to copy the early SpaceX in many aspects including a very conventional rocket design, but has only a very small number of employees right now. Lots of job offers for the region around Munich still seem to be open, including many for avionics development, but the requirements for the job already suggest a typical German mentality: If you fullfill 2/3rd of the very high requirements, your salary expectations will likely make you overqualified....

Also, the photos of mid-twenties students suggest I am likely faaar too old for those jobs. I doubt we will see a launch next year and likely, the blame will be to those things coming from outside the company, that the company promises to not exist for them: "A place with 0 politics, no bureaucracy or hidden agendas."

Damn, I really think like an old guy now, right?
 

jedidia

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Wait, they are starting production without ever having flown a prototype? Does "production" have a different meaning in a spaceflight context than it does in other industries?

"A place with 0 politics, no bureaucracy or hidden agendas."

Huh, I only know one kind of place that fulfills those specifications... Any place where there are zero people. I'm not sure how conducive that is to producing rockets, though. ?
 

Urwumpe

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Wait, they are starting production without ever having flown a prototype? Does "production" have a different meaning in a spaceflight context than it does in other industries?

I suspect they mean production in the sense of starting a pre-production series or flight prototypes. The photographs on the homepage suggest that they have some component prototypes tested on university or DLR test stands, some pictures look like Kiruna to me.
 

Urwumpe

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One more article about the event:


Why did they use LC-39 as base for their powerpoint rocket launch complex? ?
 
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