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Isar Aerospace reaches orbit and deploys payloads on second flight

isaraerospace.com

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Re: Isar Aerospace reaches orbit and deploys payloads on second flight

#91
post #4

Congratulation and great news ! For Europe, but also the world, space access is one of those frontiers we can (and I believe will) see truly opened in my lifetime and I find that truly awesome. Interestingly there still seems to be a difference in approach between "few launch, expected to go well" in europe and "many launch as trial and error" in the US, with other countries falling somewhere in between those two lim…

French Guyana is occupied territory. That's pretty clear. And so it should be deoccupied and the locals will decide whether to use their land as "sovereign' launch port by Europeans.

Should Europe also be controlled only by its indigenous population then?

(Don't actually answer that I don't want to start a big off topic discussion, just saying if we want to be logically consistent...)

Re: Isar Aerospace reaches orbit and deploys payloads on second flight

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US military products are also full of European parts.

Does Europe prevent the sale of US products based on that though?

Regularly, yes. On a lot of these sorts of products, nothing happens without governments making deals first. Mostly because governments have a need to make sure they get weapons too, not just money for the components they make.

Perhaps should be described as "sale is forbidden by default, but deals are common".

This goes 100% for either completed weapons, or components that can be directly used as a weapon, then you have "dual-use", and the less directly it's a weapon, the more free you are to do what you want.

Re: Isar Aerospace reaches orbit and deploys payloads on second flight

#93
post #88
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you'll notice how Russia just ignored what Macron said and proceeded with their attempted conquest of Ukraine anyway. Because it's just "game theory". It's just "tit for tat". Everyone knows France says a lot of things.

You have events completly backward, Russia was already invading when Macron said it. If you can't even get years in the right order you're not really arguing in good faith.

The point is that Russia didn't just turn around and go home when Macron threatened to send French troops to Ukraine. Because everyone knew they weren't actually going to do it. And they didn't.

Re: Isar Aerospace reaches orbit and deploys payloads on second flight

#94

Congrats to Isar Aerospace. If any nation in Europe that can start a new space frontier, that would be the Germans and I hope Isar would get strong support from the Bavarian state to be a neck-on-neck competitor to SpaceX.

> If any nation in Europe that can start a new space frontier, that would be the Germans

I apologise for the tactlessness, but it just made me think of Tom Lehrer's lyrics about Wernher von Braun:

> "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department" says Wernher von Braun.

Re: Isar Aerospace reaches orbit and deploys payloads on second flight

#95

Congrats to Isar Aerospace. If any nation in Europe that can start a new space frontier, that would be the Germans and I hope Isar would get strong support from the Bavarian state to be a neck-on-neck competitor to SpaceX.

>If any nation in Europe that can start a new space frontier, that would be the Germans

If that is true, then only because the company doesn't immediately have to fight Arianespace. It is France that has the strongest existing know-how and longest history in rockets, going further back than Arianespace. The gap between WW2 rocket development and now is so long that German history with rockets may as well not exist.

Re: Isar Aerospace reaches orbit and deploys payloads on second flight

#96
It might interest folks to learn:

> Incidentally, the early investment for Isar came from Bülent Altan, the Turkish ex-SpaceX guy who was in charge of the guidance system for Falcon-1, Falcon-9 and Dragon. [0]

It turns out that Altan was an angel investor in Isar, and then co-founded VC firm Alpine Space Ventures [1] and continued to invest in Isar, among other space ventures in Europe.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49583528

[1] https://alpinespace.vc/

Re: Isar Aerospace reaches orbit and deploys payloads on second flight

#97
post #53
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deep down, we're an annoyingly arrogant little country with delusions of grandeur salivating at the thought to prove to our EU neighbors how strong we meant it when we said we would accept to oppose the US in case of military attack and I think they knew we may actually mean it and not back down when it start (see also: Denmark leak about how France was essentially willing to provide whatever to help defend Greenla…

Believe me, I'm even more worried than you. I think Melanchon would actually do more damage, as crazy as it seems, Le Pen is incompetent and a sellout, Melanchon actually believes the BS he vomits. Macron finished the traditionnal left and right wing parties, which were too large and rotten to the core, but it's left us with a large center and two extremes, it's high time we have the normies left and right come back.

If the extremes are unelectable, the center party should split eventually. They'll find something to disagree about.

As long as they are more terrified of losing to the extremists they'll try to keep it together as long as they can. I hope they don't become too corrupt in the process.

Re: Isar Aerospace reaches orbit and deploys payloads on second flight

#98
post #13

This might even influence today's election in Sachsen. With a bit of luck, it could turn a few voters to a more optimistic world view.

Why would it influence the voters in Saxony-Anhalt? The voters are mainly voting AfD because all the other old parties have failed them miserably since the reunification and they don't have any other alternative, because voting for the same parties expecting a different result/future would be insanity.

The east has never been economically very strong, it used to be huge feudal-style farms and a bit of high-tech industry (planes, optics, trains, electronics in the 1930s). Not too different from now. Then there was the GDR which made things much worse.

It's not really West Germany that caused the weak economy of the East Germany. The handling of reunification did suck, but you can't just will a strong industrial base into existence neither.

Re: Isar Aerospace reaches orbit and deploys payloads on second flight

#99
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another and more immediate concern is that anything which contains subcomponents/subsystems or parts from US origin companies runs into ITAR and MTCR [1] issues with the US federal government. There's a number of very complex European origin final aviation/aerospace industry products which are laden with US-origin components. I wonder about exactly how "non-US" this Isar rocket is. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

Agreed, the moment we allowed MBDA to put some american component in our (French) missiles made with european allies (Scalp, Meteor), the US blocked our sales to Egypt because they wanted to sell their own instead, using ITAR, forcing us to fix it for the french version. The US has repeatedly proven that ITAR is for them as much of a military thing as it is an economic one, and that they're willing to use it against…

> The US has repeatedly proven that ITAR is for them as much of a military thing as it is an economic one, and that they're willing to use it against allies. If we refuse to learn that lesson, it's on us not them.

I'm actually surprised anyone ever thought it was not a military thing.

Re: Isar Aerospace reaches orbit and deploys payloads on second flight

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

French Guyana is occupied territory. That's pretty clear. And so it should be deoccupied and the locals will decide whether to use their land as "sovereign' launch port by Europeans.

Should Europe also be controlled only by its indigenous population then? (Don't actually answer that I don't want to start a big off topic discussion, just saying if we want to be logically consistent...)

French people should be occupied by Guyanans who have no historic connection to France. Apparently that makes sense to some people when it's the other way around.
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