“I expect four or five companies to get to the point of launching, and then over a period of years reliability and launch cadence [or frequency] will determine which one or two of them survives,” says McDowell.
ISAR AEROSPACE
Unique advantages
In their initial form these rockets will not rival anything on offer from SpaceX in terms of size and cadence. SpaceX sometimes launches its 70-meter (230-foot) Falcon 9 rocket multiple times per week and is developing its much larger Starship vehicle for missions to the moon and Mars. However, the smaller European rockets can allow companies in Europe to launch satellites to orbit without having to travel all the way across the Atlantic. “There is an advantage to having it closer,” says Kellner, who says it will take RFA one or two days by sea to get its rockets to SaxaVord, versus one or two weeks to travel across the Atlantic.
Launching from Europe is useful, too, for reaching specific orbits. Traditionally, a lot of satellite launches have taken place near the equator, in places such as Cape Canaveral in Florida, to get an extra boost from Earth’s rotation. Crewed spacecraft have also launched from these locations to reach space stations in equatorial orbit around Earth and the moon. From Europe, though, satellites can launch north over uninhabited stretches of water to reach polar orbit, which can allow imaging satellites to see the entirety of Earth rotate underneath them.
Increasingly, says McDowell, companies want to place satellites into sun-synchronous orbit, a type of polar orbit where a satellite orbiting Earth stays in perpetual sunlight. This is useful for solar-powered vehicles. “By far the bulk of the commercial market now is sun-synchronous polar orbit,” says McDowell. “So having a high-latitude launch site that has good transport links with customers in Europe does make a difference.”
Europe’s end goal
In the longer term, Europe’s rocket ambitions might grow to vehicles that are more of a match for the Falcon 9 through initiatives like ESA’s European Launcher Challenge, which will award contracts later this year. “We are hoping to develop [a larger vehicle] in the European Launcher Challenge,” says Kellner. Perhaps Europe might even consider launching humans into space one day on larger rockets, says Thilo Kranz, ESA’s program manager for commercial space transportation. “We are looking into this,” he says. “If a commercial operator comes forward with a smart way of approaching [crewed] access to space, that would be a favorable development for Europe.”
A separate ESA project called Themis, meanwhile, is developing technologies to reuse rockets. This was the key innovation of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, allowing the company to dramatically drive down launch costs. Some European companies, like MaiaSpace and RFA, are also investigating reusability. The latter is planning to use parachutes to bring the first stage of its rocket back to a landing in the sea, where it can be recovered.
“As soon as you get up to something like a Falcon 9 competitor, I think it’s clear now that reusability is crucial,” says McDowell. “They’re not going to be economically competitive without reusability.”
The end goal for Europe is to have a sovereign rocket industry that reduces its reliance on the US. “Where we are in the broader geopolitical situation probably makes this a bigger point than it might have been six months ago,” says Macdonald.
The continent has already shown it can diversify from the US in other ways. Europe now operates its own successful satellite-based alternative to the US Global Positioning System (GPS), called Galileo; it began launching in 2011 and is four times more accurate than its American counterpart. Isar Aerospace, and the companies that follow, might be the first sign that commercial European rockets can break from America in a similar way.
“We need to secure access to space,” says Kranz, “and the more options we have in launching into space, the higher the flexibility.”
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