This weekend, a rocket lifted off from a launch pad on a remote Norwegian island and did something no private European space company had ever done before: it reached orbit. Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum vehicle powered through max dynamic pressure, separated its first stage, ignited its second stage, and crossed the Kármán line before completing the burns needed to place its payloads into the right orbit. It was, in the words of Isar’s CEO Daniel Metzler, the moment Europe had its own space capabilities.
For decades, European companies have built extraordinary satellites, telescopes, and space science programs but have steered clear of getting them into orbit. Launch has long been the single biggest bottleneck in the global space economy: the chokepoint that determines who gets to put hardware in orbit, on what timeline, and under whose terms. Isar’s flight is the first proof that a European company can open that chokepoint from European soil, for commercial and Allied sovereign customers, without waiting on anyone else’s manifest.
This is crucial for the ability of the Alliance to deter adversaries and, if needed, defend themselves, as well as for the creation of resilient economies. Modern connectivity, surveillance, and information advantage all run through satellites. NATO itself has said as much: since 2019, the Alliance has formally treated space as an operational domain, on par with air, land, sea, and cyberspace. Positioning and timing, missile early warning, weather forecasting for mission planning, secure satellite communications, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance all depend on getting the right satellites into the right orbits, repeatedly and on schedule. If Allies cannot launch their own satellites close to home, they cannot fully control their battlefield communications with deployed forces, or rapidly respond to potential threats.
NATO allies already own or operate more than half of the world’s active satellites, and the Alliance is building ambitious shared constellations to knit them together, but those constellations are only as good as Allies’ ability to get replacement and augmentation payloads into orbit on short notice, which is exactly the gap STARLIFT is meant to close, and it’s why Isar Aerospace’s successful second Spectrum launch matters: it hands STARLIFT’s multinational access-and-launch framework its first proven, sovereign European vehicle to actually call on.
A single point of failure in getting hardware to orbit — whether a shortage of vehicles, a single dominant provider, or a geopolitical disruption — is a vulnerability that adversaries can and will exploit. Isar’s model, which pairs a flight-proven vehicle with a vertically integrated factory capable of building up to 40 rockets a year and a second launch site under construction in Nova Scotia, is designed to remove that single point of failure and make Allied launch a repeatable, scalable capability.
Access to space is also critical for deterrence. NATO leaders have already determined that an attack to, from, or within space could trigger the Alliance’s collective defence commitments, and the Alliance is explicit that space today is “contested, congested and competitive,” adversaries’ counter-space technologies threatening to restrict Allied freedom to operate there. Deterrence increasingly depends on the ability to replace, reconstitute, and disperse space capability faster than an adversary can degrade it. Distributed, commercially built, rapidly reproducible satellite and launch infrastructure is key to that effort, enabling the real-time surveillance, resilient communications, and faster targeting cycles that deterrence ultimately rests on.
None of this happens, though, unless Allied governments do their part on the demand side. NATO’s own Commercial Space Strategy, endorsed by defence ministers in February 2025, states plainly that cutting-edge space technology “is no longer limited to state actors” and commits the Alliance to lean more heavily on commercial providers and keep their services available in peacetime, crisis and conflict alike. Isar’s own order pipeline, and its ability to manufacture rockets at scale, exists because institutional and commercial customers were willing to buy before the technology was fully proven. Allied governments, defence ministries, and space agencies need to act as anchor customers, paving the way for new capabilities to emerge and for the rest of the market to then follow.
Isar’s flight from Andøya proved that Europe can build and fly its own rockets. The next stage is for Allies to act as anchor customers to continue developing the most needed capabilities at a commercial scale.
Patrick Schneider Sikorsky is a Partner at the NATO Innovation Fund and David Ordonez is a Senior Associate at the NATO Innovation Fund
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
The post NATO Innovation Fund on liftoff: the first European private company reaching orbit appeared first on Fortune.
