On its second attempt, German startup Isar Aerospace became the first European company to place payloads into orbit on a fully commercial rocket — a quiet but consequential crossing of a threshold that generations of European space ambition had approached but never reached. Where the continent once depended on institutional programs and foreign providers to access space, a private team of engineers has now demonstrated that Europe can compete on the same iterative, market-driven terms that reshaped the industry elsewhere. The achievement does not merely belong to one company; it belongs to a c