Isar Aerospace Reaches Orbit on Spectrum's Second Flight, SpaceX Flies Its 80th Starlink of 2026, and Planet Labs Grows Revenue 58% to $116.1M

Isar Aerospace delivered continental Europe's first fully commercial trip to orbit on Saturday, lifting Spectrum off Andøya Spaceport in Norway at 20:12 UTC and deploying five CubeSats after a circularisation burn. CEO Daniel Metzler said the German company will now focus on scaling launch-vehicle production and working through its order pipeline, with a new headquarters expected to eventually support up to 40 rockets per year. The flight closes out Spectrum's qualification campaign after scrubs stretching back to January and makes Isar the first European Launcher Challenge provider to clear the program's 2027 orbital milestone.

SpaceX, meanwhile, flew the 80th Starlink mission of 2026 from Vandenberg on September 5, with booster B1088 landing for the 19th time. It was the third Starlink flight since launch vice president Kiko Dontchev said future Florida Starlink missions will fly on Starship, with three Starship towers under construction at Kennedy and Cape Canaveral. Planet Labs added the window's clearest capital signal: revenue up 58% year on year to $116.1 million for the quarter ending July 31, with EMEA now 48% of revenue after growing 130%, led by defense and intelligence customers.

At the U.S. Army's Project Convergence, soldiers draped wet T-shirts on overheating Starlink terminals in the Mojave, a field detail that reinforces the service's commercial-first strategy for its NGC2 command-and-control architecture. ESA confirmed on September 3 that BepiColombo's Mercury Transfer Module had separated from the stack, the first step in an arrival sequence ESA says will place two spacecraft in orbit around Mercury in December. On September 9 and 10, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher will use the International Space Summit in Paris to press European leaders on Europe's ambition for the next era of exploration.