by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

I had the occasion to visit the booths of two German startups, Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg, that are eyeing maiden flights of their small satellite launch vehicles next year.

• Payloads selected for Spectrum’s maiden flight scheduled for end of 2022
• Five institutions from Germany, Norway and Slovenia with a total of seven small satellites to launch on the first test flight of Isar Aerospace’s launch vehicle “Spectrum”
• For the first time in Europe, the German government entrusts a privately financed European space company with the launch of institutional payloads

MUNICH, 13 December 2021 (Isar Aerospace PR) – Isar Aerospace, the leading and most well-funded private European launch service provider focusing on small and medium satellites, and the German Space Agency at DLR have announced the selection of the institutional payloads for the maiden flight of the “Spectrum” rocket planned for the end of 2022 as part of the microlauncher competition. Among the winners of the Announcement of Opportunity are five institutions from Germany, Norway, and Slovenia with a total of seven small satellites that will be used to demonstrate various technologies in space such as communication or weather data measurement.

• An international team of researchers uses experiments to show that topological insulators could serve as the basis for highly efficient electronic components.
• Scientists from the DLR Institute for Optical Sensor Systems are participating in the study.
• These quantum materials could ensure faster mobile data transmission in the future.
• In the future, this material can also play a major role in the development of detector systems such as space telescopes.

COLOGNE, Germany (DLR PR) — They are considered to be extremely interesting materials for the electronics of the future: Topological insulators conduct electricity in a special way and promise new types of circuits and faster mobile communications. An international team of researchers, with the participation of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), has now unraveled a fundamental property of the new class of materials: How do the electrons in the material react when they are “startled” with short pulses of so-called terahertz radiation? The results are not only important for a fundamental understanding of these novel quantum materials, but could also ensure faster mobile data communication in the future or be used in highly sensitive detector systems for the exploration of distant planets. 

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (Roscosmos PR) — This morning, March 22, 2021, the Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket with the Fregat upper stage and 38 spacecraft on board was launched from the launch pad No. 31 of the Baikonur cosmodrome. 

After 1 hour and 3 minutes after the launch, the main payload was separated – the South Korean satellite for Earth remote sensing CAS500-1. At the moment, after processing telemetry information, the upper stage has successfully completed all stages of the program for placing the remaining 37 spacecraft into target orbits.

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (Roscosmos PR) — At the Baikonur Cosmodrome on March 20, 2021, a meeting of the commission was held, during which the results of tests of the Soyuz-2.1a space rocket were considered after a technical malfunction revealed this morning. After hearing the reports of the work supervisors, the members of the commission decided to launch the launch on the morning of Monday, March 22, 2021. Dmitry Rogozin, General Director of the […]

• On October 14, 2020, the winners of the INNOspace Masters competition were honored in an online conference.
• More than 300 companies, start-ups, universities and research institutions in 15 European countries answered the call.
• The new 2020/21 competition will start under the motto “Innovations for sustainable infrastructures – in space and on earth”.

COLOGNE, Germany (DLR PR) — Under the motto “New Ideas between Space and Earth”, the space management of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) searched the fifth INNOspace Masters competition for new ideas and concepts that address current challenges in space travel and other industries and offer innovative solutions. Five competition categories – called “Challenges” – from different development and innovation phases in the value chain were available for the participants to choose from. 

The “DLR Space Management Challenge” focused on the research and development phase, while the industrial partners Airbus and OHB were looking for proposals for solutions that were already ready for the market. DB Netz AG, since this year an additional industrial partner of the competition, focused on innovations from the space industry for the monitoring, inspection and maintenance of the rail infrastructure. The “ESA BIC Start-up Challenge”, which was aimed at the start-up