On 30 March 2025, Spectrum lifted off from the Andoya Spaceport in Norway. Thirty seconds later it was over. A vent valve had opened when it should not have, the rocket lost attitude control as it began a roll, and the flight was terminated. After seven years and hundreds of millions of euros, the first attempt lasted half a minute.
To understand why Isar's people kept going, you go back to a student club. Daniel Metzler, Josef Fleischmann and Markus Brandl were active in WARR, the rocketry group at the Technical University of Munich. WARR students had already built their own engines and a suborbital rocket. Rockets were not a business idea for these three. They were something you built on weekends, with classmates, and then did again better.
The second launch, called Onward and Upward, was delayed by a boat in the safety zone, a leaking pressure vessel and high winds.
In 2018 they founded Isar Aerospace near Munich, naming it for the river that runs through the city. The first money was modest and came from believers: Bulent Altan, a former SpaceX leader, along with the Viessmann family's venture arm and UVC Partners. Altan's early nod mattered, because it told other investors that somebody who had seen a space start-up from the inside thought this one was real.
Then the cheques got large. In April 2020 Earlybird and Airbus Ventures led a USD 17M round. That December Lakestar led EUR 75M. Porsche SE joined in 2021. In March 2023 a USD 165M Series C came, followed by USD 70M from the NATO Innovation Fund, and the company passed EUR 400M raised. It leased Andoya for 20 years, won a EUR 10M EU prize in 2022 and became the first private company CNES picked to launch from French Guiana.
All of it rode on a rocket that had to work. After the 2025 failure the team found the cause and rebuilt. The second launch, called Onward and Upward, was delayed by a boat in the safety zone, a leaking pressure vessel and high winds. On 5 September 2026 it reached orbit and released five CubeSats and an experiment.
There was a cost beyond money. Days after the triumph, the story turned: Fleischmann stepped down as CTO to start his own firm, Bavaria Instruments, keeping his Isar stake. Co-founders do not always want the same next chapter even when they share the same rocket.
The lesson for founders is about the first thirty seconds. A hardware company can fail in public, on a live stream, and still be the same company a year later, if the reason it began was never a business plan but a club of friends who liked building things.