German launch services provider Isar Aerospace is preparing for the second flight of its two-stage Spectrum rocket, with maritime safety notices indicating launch opportunities between Jan. 21 and Jan. 23 from the And\u00f8ya Spaceport in northern Norway.<\/p>\n
A Notice to Mariners (NOTMAR) issued by And\u00f8ya Space shows 15-minute launch windows available between 21:05 and 21:20 CET on Jan. 20\u201323, while Isar Aerospace said the mission \u2014 dubbed Onward and Upward \u2014 will take place no earlier than Jan. 21.<\/p>\n
The flight follows the company\u2019s inaugural Spectrum launch in March 2025, which lifted off from And\u00f8ya but failed less than a minute into flight. In December 2025, Isar Aerospace said it had completed successful hot-fire tests of both stages of the rocket, clearing the final major technical milestone ahead of a second launch attempt.<\/p>\n
The upcoming mission will mark the first Spectrum flight to carry payloads under Isar Aerospace\u2019s participation in the DLR Microlauncher Challenge, a programme launched in 2020 to foster sovereign European launch capabilities with support from the European Space Agency\u2019s Boost! initiative.<\/p>\n
Isar Aerospace was selected as a second-round winner of the challenge in 2021, securing \u20ac11 million in funding. Under the programme\u2019s terms, the company is required to launch two sets of payloads with a combined mass of up to 150 kg across its first two flights. While the inaugural Spectrum launch flew without customer payloads, the second mission will carry a mix of academic and commercial spacecraft.<\/p>\n
According to an updated payload manifest, satellites from the Technical University of Berlin, the University of Maribor and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology remain onboard, alongside new payloads from EnduroSat, the TU Wien Space Team and Dcubed. Some payloads originally selected in 2021 are no longer listed.<\/p>\n
Isar Aerospace has also disclosed that it is already building Spectrum vehicles for flights three through seven, signalling an ambition to rapidly increase launch cadence once the rocket enters operational service.<\/p>\n
The Spectrum rocket is part of a broader push by European startups to establish independent access to space for small satellite operators, as competition intensifies with U.S. and Chinese commercial launch providers.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
German launch services provider Isar Aerospace is preparing for the second flight of its two-stage Spectrum rocket, with maritime safety notices indicating launch opportunities between Jan. 21 and Jan. 23 from the And\u00f8ya Spaceport in northern Norway. A Notice to Mariners (NOTMAR) issued by And\u00f8ya Space shows 15-minute launch windows available between 21:05 and 21:20 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[7225,1914,244,831,474,325,5895,6751],"class_list":["post-21065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-andoya-space","tag-dlr","tag-europe","tag-european-space-agency","tag-isar-aerospace","tag-norway","tag-small-satellite-launch","tag-spectrum-rocket"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21065"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21065\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}