A dramatic drone video shows Isar Aerospace's first orbital launch attempt, which ended with a fiery crash into the frigid sea about 30 seconds after liftoff.
The Germany company's first Spectrum rocket lifted off Sunday morning (March 30) from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway on the first-ever orbital launch attempt from European soil.
Spectrum cleared the tower but suffered an anomaly shortly thereafter. The rocket flipped over and slammed into the ocean near the pad, sending an orange-tinted cloud high into a clear Arctic sky, as the video shows.
The launch pad and surrounding infrastructure appear to have escaped damage, according to Isar Aerospace. The company accentuated the positive about Spectrum's debut, saying the 95-foot-tall (28 meters) rocket performed quite well overall.
"Our first test flight met all our expectations, achieving a great success," Isar Aerospace CEO and Co-founder Daniel Metzler said in an emailed statement. "We had a clean liftoff, 30 seconds of flight and even got to validate our flight termination system."
European space officials were similarly sanguine.
"A test flight is exactly that: a test to gather data, learn and improve," European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher said in a different statement on Sunday.
"Everything Isar Aerospace achieved today is remarkable, and they will have lots of data to analyze," he added. "I applaud the teams for getting this far, and I am confident that we will see the next Spectrum on the launch pad ready for test flight 2 liftoff soon."
