Isar

He is mindless and bound within the absoluteness of the issue, the unchangeability of the great icy not-being which holds good forever and is supreme.

Passing further away towards Austria, travelling up the Isar, till the stream becomes smaller and whiter and the air is colder, the full glamour of the northern hills, which are so marvelously luminous and gleaming with flowers, wanes and gives way to a darkness, a sense of ominousness.

Up there I saw another little Christ, who seemed the very soul of the place.

The road went beside the river, that was seething with snowy ice-bubbles, under the rocks under the high, wolf-like pine-trees, between the pinkish shoals.

So one follows the blue and white ring, or the three stripes of blue and white, or the red smear, as the case may be.

And the red on the rocks, the dabs of red paint, are of just the same color as the red upon the crucifixes, so that the red upon the crucifixes is paint, and the signs on the rocks are sensational, like blood.

I remember the little brooding Christ of the Isar in his little cloak of red flannel and his crown of gilded thorns, and he remains real and dear to me among all this violence of representation.

Couvre-toi de gloire, Tartarin, couvre-toi de flanelle.

If both of these leaders cast a glance in the rear view mirror, however, they just might glimpse a new competitor that has just entered the race behind them.

Its name is Isar Aerospace.

And on screen, this is a couple of different versions of rockets that these companies are sending up.

Anyway, so Isar Aerospace, uh, this new, "new space" quote, unquote, company hails from Germany and launches its rockets out of the Andøya, hope I'm pronouncing that right, launch complex in Norway.

It's not an ideal location for launch, right? So from Andøya, rockets primarily have to launch northward if they want to avoid flying over to, over land to minimize risk to persons on the ground, giving up the advantages of launching with a boost from Earth's eastward spin.

So nor are Isar's rockets particularly powerful relative to the SpaceX Falcon 9, for example, or the Neutron rocket that Rocket Labs will begin flying next year.

That's not necessarily the most important fact about Isar and Andøya, however.

This is a European rocket flying out of Europe by a private company.

Andrew, space, your happy place.

the SpaceX European rival, or is it? Tell us what happened this week with ISAR.

Well, it's the first ever European launch into orbit, where we've actually launched something that's actually got to space commercially, and actually ever from the European geography, because all of the traditional European Space Agency launches have come from French Guyana.

Britain, who's the only country ever to give up an indigenous launch capability in the 70s, used to launch from Australia, so...

And that's because, you know, they've got three launch systems that can launch, you know, more than 40 tonnes into orbit.

And that's important for when you think about, you know, crewed launches, when you think about lunar modules, large military satellites, that sort of stuff.

And constellations of satellites, you know, if you can't launch, you know, ISAR, which is what started this topic, you know, is a one-tonne rocket.

Starship is 100 tonnes.