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Isar Aerospace's second Spectrum rocket launches from Andoya Space Center in Norway on Sept. 5, 2026. | Credit: Isar Aerospace
No rocket had ever reached orbit from Western European soil — until today.
The German company Isar Aerospace launched its Spectrum rocket from Andøya Space Center in northern Norway today (Sept. 5) at 4:12 p.m. EDT (2012 GMT; 10:12 p.m. local time in Norway). A little over seven minutes later, it etched its name into the record books, settling into an elliptical path around our planet.
"This is right now making history — making history for Spectrum, making history for Isar, making history for Europe," Nikolaos Perakis, Spectrum chief engineer at Isar, said during today's launch webcast, which the company produced in collaboration with NASASpaceflight. "I'm incredibly proud of this massive achievement."
The view from the second stage of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket after it reached orbit on Sept. 5, 2026. | Credit: Isar Aerospace/NASASpaceflight
This was Spectrum's second bite at the apple: The two-stage, 95-foot-tall (28-meter-tall) rocket first flew in March 2025, lifting off from Andøya on a flight Isar called "Going Full Spectrum." But, as often happens on debut missions, Spectrum suffered an anomaly that day; it came crashing back to Earth less than a minute after launch.
"A comprehensive investigation was completed within two months of the launch," Isar wrote in a September 2025 update. "The findings identified an unintended opening of the vent valve and a loss of attitude control at the start of the roll maneuver as the initiating events that led to the in-flight failure."
The company took the lessons learned that day and geared up for flight number two, "Onward and Upward," which was originally supposed to launch in January.
An issue with a pressurization valve nixed that plan, however, pushing the flight to March. Bad weather and an intruding boat scuttled multiple attempts that month, and an April 9 try was scrubbed due to a leak in a composite overwrapped pressure vessel.
Isar next tried to fly on June 15 but stood down after "detecting off-nominal behavior in the vehicle's fluid systems," according to a company update that day on X. But the company got that issue under control, rolling Spectrum back to the pad for today's launch.
"We had some delays, obviously," Petrakis said during the webcast. "We had some setbacks, but we came back stronger from them. And it validates this tremendous amount of engineering across all the teams, and that's what brings us into orbit."
Spectrum didn't carry viable payloads on its debut flight, but it did today: Five cubesats and one non-deployable scientific experiment went up on "Onward and Upward."
Spectrum's upper stage needed to deploy those payloads before Isar could declare full mission success. And deployment couldn't occur until after the rocket performed a circularization burn to get out of its initial elliptical orbit, which was estimated to feature a closest approach to Earth of 112 miles (180 kilometers) and a farthest-away point of 311 miles (500 km).
Spectrum was able to check those boxes, ultimately deploying the payloads as planned, Isar announced via X about two hours after launch.
