Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket delivered CubeSats to low Earth orbit on its second flight, making the Munich-based company the first European commercial operator to reach orbit from continental European soil. The two-stage vehicle stands 28 meters tall, lifts 1,000 kg to LEO, and is priced at €10,000 per kilogram. That payload capacity beats Rocket Lab's Electron outright. The rocket is expendable, but Isar has several more Spectrum vehicles in production and a factory coming online with capacity for 40 units per year.
BepiColombo, launched in 2018, jettisoned its ion propulsion module this week after achieving the trajectory and velocity needed for Mercury orbital capture in November. The spacecraft carries two independent orbiters: ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter. They separate in December, then operate solo for at least one year of science. The original article links directly to ESA's arrival-phase updates and the ion drive engineering detail, both worth reading for the trajectory math alone.
Spotify killed the Car Thing two years after its 2022 release. The open-source community ignored that decision. The bridgething.com project now runs a full Linux distribution on the hardware, with a custom UI, Home Assistant integration, weather, and music playback. A live contest with cash prizes is funding new app development. This is the rare case where abandoned consumer hardware got more capable after corporate support ended, and the contest entries will tell you exactly how far it can go.
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