Frankfurt (Germany) (AFP) – The head of Germany’s Isar Aerospace voiced hope Tuesday that the company could one day overtake Elon Musk’s SpaceX to become the world’s premier space launch company. Daniel Metzler, who founded the company with two fellow students in 2018, pointed to a huge backlog of launch orders, helped by European military clients.
“SpaceX was founded in 2002. Back then I was playing with Pokemon cards,” he said. “Looking at what could happen in the next 18 years, I wouldn’t rule out us being further ahead than SpaceX.” Isar became in September the first privately financed European company to get a rocket into orbit. Europe is betting that competition between Isar and other players such as Rocket Factory Augsburg will bring down the price of satellite launches. This would help ensure affordable access to space for sectors ranging from telecommunications to defence, independent of entities such as SpaceX, the sector leader valued at $1.9 trillion (1.7 trillion euros).
Speaking at a conference organised by the SZ newspaper, Metzler said Isar had already come a long way, noting that SpaceX needed four attempts to get into orbit compared to Isar’s two. Capacity rather than demand was now the big bottleneck, Metzler added. He said the company was 15-times oversubscribed for 2028 launches as European governments now preferred European providers to put their defence satellites up as opposed to firms overseas. “There’s 14 customers for every rocket that we have to disappoint,” he said.
“About 18 months ago 85 percent of inquiries were commercial and 15 percent were military, and that ratio has since flipped,” he added. Isar is working on developing reusable rockets to boost capacity and bring launch costs down, hoping to catch up with SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket. “Already with our next launch, for which we are currently finalising the launch vehicle, we will be taking initial measurements to assess the re-entry of the rocket’s first stage,” he said.
“Over the next three or four flights, we also plan to start flying hardware specifically designed for reusability.” Asked if Isar could one day be valued at 100 billion euros, Metzler said, “people massively underestimate the potential of space.” “To be honest, I reckon the figure is much higher, but then people would be even more convinced that I’m completely mad.” pca-vbw/fz/js
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