Rejoice! Europe finally has its SpaceX!
Except, of course, it doesn’t.
Before I get into this, Isar Aerospace does deserve enormous credit for putting its Spectrum rocket into orbit from Norway this week. It was only the company’s second attempt, making it the first privately developed European rocket to reach orbit from continental Europe. It took SpaceX four.
However, let’s face it, the breathless “European SpaceX rival” headlines are somewhat premature. The cold, hard facts show us Isar is not about to catch up with SpaceX any time soon.
Consider the numbers. Isar was founded in 2018, employs nearly 500 people and has raised roughly $1 billion. Its latest round valued it at about €2 billion, and has achieved one successful orbital launch. Pretty good in space industry terms, but still some way short of where it needs to be.
SpaceX, meanwhile, completed 165 Falcon 9 launches in 2025. By September 6 this year, it had already flown Falcon 9 103 times. As of March, Falcon 9 had achieved more than 570 booster landings. There have been 540 launches and a mission success rate above 99%. Yes, it is historically much older and has vastly more funding to play with, but that’s the reality.
Falcon 9's published maximum low-Earth orbit capability is roughly 22,000kg. By contrast, Spectrum can put around 1,000kg into LEO. And its new Munich-based factory aims to eventually produce 40 rockets a year. Eventually…
This is why it’s far too early to pop the Champagne corks on ‘Europe’s SpaceX’.
Isar’s 40 rockets a year is less than one-third of SpaceX's current annual Falcon programme. Even Isar itself admits getting it will take years to catch up.
The real, glaring problem is staring us in the face: Spectrum’s rockets are expendable. Instead, it depends heavily on manufacturing optimisation and high-frequency production rather than recovering the actual hardware.
And the reality is that SpaceX won the economics of launch by making the most expensive part of the rocket reusable. Falcon boosters now routinely fly dozens of times; one of those launched last week was making its 35th flight, for pity’s sake.
Isar proposes selling Spectrum missions for roughly $10m-$15m. In space industry terms, that’s quite cheap, but that still doesn’t address SpaceX's scale, payload capacity and ability to amortise hardware across repeated flights. SpaceX will happily sell so-called rideshare capacity too: one published example prices 320kg to sun-synchronous orbit at $2.24m.
So what should Isar do?
Perhaps it could take a leaf out of Apple’s playbook.
Apple's greatest trick was rarely inventing a category first. It watched technologies mature, identified what worked, discarded what didn't and then ruthlessly integrated the winning features of startups and rivals.
Europe’s rocketry industry should do the same.
Reusable rockets are no longer science fiction. SpaceX has spent billions proving it works. Last year, Japan's Honda demonstrated an experimental reusable rocket that launched vertically to 271 metres and landed upright just 37cm from its target. As we’ve seen, the basic architecture has been de-risked by SpaceX and is now eminently copyable.
Isar needn’t steal SpaceX, or indeed Honda’s, intellectual property, but the playbook: employing reusable stages, mass manufacturing, software-defined operations, automation and relentless simplification.
Meanwhile, AI may have arrived at exactly the right moment.
Modern AI-assisted engineering tools can explore vastly more designs, automate simulation and reduce engineering iteration times. Look at the capabilities offered by Cusp AI, for instance, in being able to design new materials. NASA is already producing AI-designed spacecraft hardware that is lighter, carries higher loads and takes a fraction of the time to develop.
That is how Isar could catch up with, and potentially leapfrog, SpaceX.
But, bizarrely, Isar says it is instead taking an “IKEA approach” to manufacturing. According to Isar’s chief executive Daniel Metzler, that means building “a lot of units.”
This seems utterly pointless when every one of those units is going to burn up in the atmosphere.
Isar says it has a team “exploring” reusable rockets. Perhaps they should “explore” a little faster.