Spaceflight

• Isar Aerospace granted Permit for Launch by Norwegian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA)
• Launch period for first test flight set to begin 20 March 2025
• Objective for first integrated test of the launch vehicle is to collect as much data and experience as possible

In August 2024, the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Fisheries tasked the Civil Aviation Authority of Norway with investigating the risks, socio-economic costs, and other consequences for Norwegian security and societal interests posed by potential rocket launches from Sweden passing over Norway. The completed report was presented on 25 February 2025 and made public on the CAA Norway website on 7 March. While the report’s summary states that there is not enough information to assess the “actual risks associated with such activities,” the document itself is more critical.

The report highlights flaws in the Swedish Space Corporation’s risk analysis (the commercial entity responsible for the Esrange Space Centre), particularly regarding population density along possible rocket flight paths:

“The analyses presented by SSC have not taken actual nor recent population data in the affected areas into account. Furthermore, neither the number of people living in the area nor the high number of tourists and other transient populations are represented. The affected areas in Norway are significantly more populated than the areas on the Swedish side, and it is not possible to find any trajectory from Esrange that does not overfly populated areas in Norway.”

It will be interesting to see if anything comes of this.

In a March 12 media roundtable, Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of ULA, said the anomaly was traced to a “manufacturing defect” in one of the internal parts of the nozzle, an insulator. Specific details, he said, remained proprietary.

“We have isolated the root cause and made appropriate corrective actions,” he said, which were confirmed in a static-fire test of a motor at a Northrop test site in Utah in February. “So we are back continuing to fabricate hardware and, at least initially, screening for what that root cause was.”

That investigation was aided by the recovery of hardware that fell off the motor while in flight, which landed near the pad, as well as “trimmings” of material left over from the manufacturing process. ULA also recovered both boosters from the ocean so that they could compare the one that lost its nozzle to the one that performed normally. The defective hardware “just stood out night and day,” Bruno said. “It was pretty clear that that was an outlier, far out of family.”

That information has been passed along to the Space Force as part of the process to obtain certification for national security missions. “We’ve completed everything that you’re supposed to do,” he said, with that information provided last month. “Typically, it’s not a very long process in the past when vehicles are certified,” but deferred questions on the timeline of certification to the Space Force.

ULA’s next launch will be not of Vulcan but of Atlas, carrying a set of satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper constellation. That would be followed, once Vulcan is certified, of the USSF-106 and USSF-87 missions for the Space Force before switching back to Kuiper launches.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/34408488

In a 12 March update, Isar Aerospace announced that the Norwegian Space Agency had awarded the German rocket builder the contract to launch both AOS-D and AOS-P. The satellites will be launched aboard a Spectrum rocket from the Andøya Spaceport in Norway by 2028.