[HN Gopher] Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in fir...
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Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, fails early in first stage flight
Author : tretiy3
Score : 88 points
Date : 2025-03-30 15:08 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nasaspaceflight.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nasaspaceflight.com)
| perihelions wrote:
| Launch video with timestamp,
|
| https://youtu.be/bykfQ3J4NNc?t=2049
|
| edit: And different camera angles here,
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlAgenP2RxM
|
| https://tv.vg.no/nyheter/se-den-historiske-rakettoppskytning...
| belter wrote:
| Gorgeous landscape.
| fifilura wrote:
| Norway is like that.
|
| Almost everywhere along the coast.
|
| Just breathtaking.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Why does the first video just cut to nothing for the most
| exciting part, the fall?
| olex wrote:
| It was a live stream, presumably stream operators had
| instructions to not show the kaboom live on camera, should
| one occur.
| tectonic wrote:
| The first orbital launch attempt from continental Europe, and the
| first of Europe's batch of newspace commercial launch startups. I
| hope they figure out what happened and iterate quickly!
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think that should be "first commercial orbital launch attempt
| from continental Europe".
|
| Commercial is required to exclude launches from the Plesetsk
| Cosmodrome, orbital is required to exclude the Miura 1 attempt,
| Europe is required for obvious reasons & continental is
| required to exclude the LauncherOne attempt, and attempt is
| required for obvious reasons.
| verzali wrote:
| If you want to get technical, Andoya is an island separated
| from continental Europe...
| iSnow wrote:
| Also the biggest German rocket since V2.
| shafyy wrote:
| Oh boy, this launch looks so cool with the all the ice and snowy
| rocks in the background
| intrasight wrote:
| For sure, the coolest launch setting there has been.
| pmontra wrote:
| Days ago I read an interview in which somebody from Isar said
| that they would be happy to get 30 seconds of flight time. They
| would learn a lot from the data. It's more or less what happened.
| mertbio wrote:
| > CEO and Co-founder Daniel Metzler: "Our first test flight met
| all our expectations, achieving a great success. We had a clean
| liftoff, 30 seconds of flight and even got to validate our Flight
| Termination System. With this result, we feel confident to
| approach our second flight."
|
| See: https://isaraerospace.com/newsroom-first-test-flight
| michaeljx wrote:
| Does the flight termination system consist of the rocket free-
| falling into the ground resulting in a fiery explosion?
| mertbio wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| > Also, it didn't fall into the ground, but into the water.
|
| Ah yes very important distinction this
| SR2Z wrote:
| I cannot tell if you're joking or not, but a rocket
| crashing into water vs on land is easily the difference
| between "no big deal" and "property damage + loss of
| life."
| piker wrote:
| _See also_ the V2 Rocket.
| belter wrote:
| Normally a flight termination system has explosive charges.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| For larger rockets this is typical, however smaller rockets
| often only have a thrust termination system - for example
| apparently Rocketlab's Electron uses thrust termination.
| mrtksn wrote:
| 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.
| perihelions wrote:
| To minimize the shock impact on the ground. This one
| created a respectable-sized tsunami,
|
| https://youtu.be/LlAgenP2RxM?t=116
| mlindner wrote:
| 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.
| ck2 wrote:
| > _" that explosion wasn't a failure, it was an experiment rich
| with data"_ - Neil deGrasse Tyson
| IshKebab wrote:
| Certainly a glass half full way of looking at it.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| This is excellent. I didn't realize earlier they were going to
| fly so soon already. Just now fixes and more flights. I hope the
| press, voters or investors don't treat the crash as a reason to
| cut off funding.
| nw05678 wrote:
| I would love to invest in this.
| toni wrote:
| Launching a rocket from Earth surface looks like such a complex
| challenge not completely solved, and companies consider a
| 30-seconds journey a great success.
|
| I have sincerely no intention to trivialize this, but would we
| ever see rockets launched from Moon or low Earth orbit? It
| seems so inefficient to launch like how we do now.
| vessenes wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| > 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...
| panick21_ wrote:
| 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.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Why? Rocket companies are a horrible investment and almost all
| of them fail. The small rocket market is tiny, and requires
| huge investment. Pretty much all companies have given up on
| that market completely and are moving to bigger rockets.
|
| RocketLab is still flying electron, but they never produced
| much profit from it and are themselves moving to a bigger
| rocket.
| jumploops wrote:
| As a software engineer, this might sound like a failure, but
| launching plus 30s of flight time means a lot of things went
| right.
|
| If you're curious about commercial launch vehicles, there's a
| decent documentary about the challenges these aerospace startups
| face called Wild Wild Space[0].
|
| Just getting the thing off the ground is a huge milestone. I wish
| them the best in future launches.
|
| [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Wild_Space
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Looks like it was completely successful. They willingly
| terminated the launch after achieving mission goals.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Tilting the rocket didn't work as intended though, so
| something did go seriously wrong.
| iSnow wrote:
| The rocket started oscillating before. I believe it was
| pure coincidence that the launch termination system kicked
| in when they started the pitchover manoeuvre.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Yes. I didn't really notice that, but now that you
| mention it it's very clear.
| olex wrote:
| "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).
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| That would be "wildly beyond expectations". If some project
| achieves 100% of the goals, that is complete success by
| definition. They did it.
| senko wrote:
| The book the show is based on / related to, _When heavens went
| on sale_ (by Ashlee Vance) is well worth a read, as are
| _Liftoff_ and _Reentry_ (by Eric Berger).
| apples_oranges wrote:
| Is this rocket ,,dual use"?
| perihelions wrote:
| If your enemy is your employer and their launchpad
| infrastructure--yes!
|
| Less jokingly: liquid-fueled rockets aren't very practical
| weapons, especially ones with cryogenic fuels like liquid
| oxygen. I highly recommend Clark's _Ignition! An Informal
| History of Liquid Rocket Propellants_ for a history of the
| space and missile races, as understood from the point-of-view
| of a propellant chemist who worked in them. There 's an amazing
| amount of lost art and lore from the early Cold-war space era,
| that's no longer relevant in the modern world, except for its
| sheer entertainment value.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| 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.
| iSnow wrote:
| The boosters of the Ariane 5 were also developed into the
| French M51 SLBM:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M51_(missile)
| panick21_ wrote:
| With Ariane 6, they switched to Italian soilds. This was
| basically France buying of Italy so they would side with
| them to build Ariane 6, rather then Ariane 5 ME that
| Germany wanted.
| panick21_ wrote:
| All rockets are "dual use" in theory. Lots of the technology,
| such as guidance and so on, is the same. But this rocket is
| about as far on the 'launch sats to orbit' side as you can
| build a rocket.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| It also is more environmentally friendly than rockets from other
| states.
| kensai wrote:
| Excellent attempt. The more, the merrier!
| 3ple_alpha wrote:
| Too bad all European spaceports seem to be so awkwardly placed
| for the purpose of spectating launches. Main one in one of the
| most remote areas of jungle in the world, there's one in Sweden
| (been focusing on suborbital launches) far to the north where
| only moose live, now this. Americans are really lucky in that
| regard.
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