Latitude

Zephyr is nineteen metres tall and carries a hundred kilograms to orbit, rising to two hundred with an uprated engine. Both stages run the Navier, which Latitude 3D prints in-house, clustered on the first stage and flown singly with a vacuum nozzle on the second. The propellants are oxygen and kerosene, the tanks aluminium, the body composite, and the company makes nearly all of it itself.

The argument is that rideshare cannot give a customer the orbit or the date they want, so dedicated small launch has a market if anyone can make it economic, and that the way to make it economic is a factory rather than a workshop. Latitude is building toward fifty vehicles a year near Reims, with its own pad at the Guiana Space Centre. A sovereignty argument sits on top: French-owned, French-funded through France 2030, launching from French territory.

The furthest it has got is a combustion chamber. In April 2025 Latitude hot-fired a Navier chamber in flight configuration for ten seconds, which is real progress, but there has been no public demonstration of a complete integrated engine, no stage-level static fire and no flight. The first launch was promised for 2024, then 2025, then 2026, and in some reporting now 2027. The advertised payload has moved too, between one and two hundred kilograms, which makes the commitments already signed with CNES and ATMOS Space Cargo harder to size. The wider record is unforgiving: no European microlauncher has ever reached orbit, and the factory is being built before the rocket has flown once.