Congratulations! An immensely important achievement, I’d say.

IMO, this success has a great implication for accessibility and sovereignty of the EU. Although ESA can launch from French Guiana, the spaceport is an ocean-away from Europe! That fact alone affects the cost and the launch cadence for Europe greatly.

Now they prove they can launch directly from Norway with their own production from Munich and elsewhere and that has immense potential for the future: much higher launch cadence, significant lower cost and always-on accessibility.

The only way Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch it from their own soil and reuse the first stage. Also from the perspective of security, launching spy and other military satellites from EU soil is the only practical possibility in this political climate.

This is a huge success, but it I think also tells us that the EU is further decoupling itself from the US. Slowly but steadily.

Which is obviously the right thing to do, but it's interesting that it's not just a hypothetical anymore.

Just for context, when Boeing completed the 747 Airbus wasn't even a thing. 5 decades later they have caught up in most categories and even surpassed in some. Who knows, maybe something similar will happen again?

A good historical nugget is that the Americans got a huge leg up in the space race by importing the Germans who worked on the V-2 program.

Germans killed Soviets by the millions. If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could get their hands on you.

If you were the Americans, you distrusted the Soviets already, so it was a win-win.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

I'd rather see something owned by the people, not private.

Congrats! How come European companies still haven't managed to match SpaceX's capabilities? Europe has an incredible talent pool, especially in aerospace, and some of the world’s best expertise in precision engineering, instrumentation, sensors, avionics, and other hard-tech subsystems. A huge amount of the expertise and supply chain for these components is concentrated in Europe.

So what are we missing? Is it mainly systems integration, manufacturing scale, risk tolerance, organizational structure, or the willingness to iterate as aggressively as SpaceX? It feels like Europe has many of the pieces needed to build world-class launch systems, but hasn't yet put them together at the same scale and speed.

Plesetsk is also european soil.

> "The findings identified an unintended opening of the vent valve

How do they figure things like this out, after a rocket goes "boom"?

FYI Norway is not in the EU. Whether they are European is a matter of perspective and I'm not touching that subject any further! Deutschland is in the EU.

I wonder whether the Sámi people have been consulted or compensated for the use of their traditional lands as a rocket launch site. Given Norway’s long history of suppressing Sámi people and their land rights, I'd be interested to know how that was handled.

Interesting that it uses Propane fuel and "weaves" the rockets with carbon composite.

Really sad to see that Europe is so far behind.

Consider India, once single country vs all of Europe: 88 orbital launches successfully reached orbit using Indian built rockets starting in 1980.

This is out of 104 individual liftoffs.

Over 46 years of successful launches.

Isar Aerospace launch into orbit [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss1DUqLjecc (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49580325)

This is such a breath of fresh air

Congrats! didn't know german has this ability before.

Yeah in general it’s good advice to not existentially challenge the Germans.

Why are they on X? As a European company, should they not be posting instead from W Social?

Made with imipolex g?

What Europe needs to do to spur its tech sector is lower taxes.

A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines.

The study is quite rigorous too:

https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/tax-cuts-and...

Fantastic job!

The Germans also launched the first rocket to make it to space on June 20th 1944, though it wasn't privately made.

i was under the impression that the closer you launch from the equator, the less sustained force you need. wrong?

o/

The sooner Europe cuts itself off from the US crazy billionaires, the better - on all levels (software and manufacture processes are the two biggest issues). Today we already could see the US surrender team crawling up to dictator Putin. Enough is enough - agent Krasnov needs to be isolated.

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o/

One can hope they can repurpose this to a shield for Ukraine

How can it be the first European rocket? There’s the ESA! Are you telling me we have all these organisations and none of them have ever launched from their own continent?

> from European soil

When someone emphasizes nationalism a bit too much that's usually only because they don't have enough technical merit to talk about.