Updated at 3:15 p.m. Eastern with social media posts from PLD Space.
WASHINGTON – Spanish company PLD Space launched its first suborbital rocket on October 6. The company called the flight a success, even though it reached a lower altitude than planned.
The company’s Miura-1 rocket lifted off at 8:19 p.m. Eastern time (2:19 a.m. local time on October 7) from the El Arenosillo Experimental Center, a test site in southwestern Spain operated by the country’s National Institute of Aerospace Engineering . The rocket flew on a suborbital trajectory for 306 seconds before landing in the Atlantic Ocean. The company said in a statement it was working to recover the missile from the sea.
The rocket reached a peak altitude of 46 kilometers during the flight. In a press kit issued before the launch, PLD Space said the rocket had a planned peak of 80 kilometers and a flight time of 12 minutes.
PLD Space did not initially disclose why Miura 1 missed its planned altitude, but called the flight a success and said the vehicle met “all technical objectives” in terms of its performance.
In a later series of social media posts On October 7, Raúl Torres, co-founder of PLD Space and the mission’s launch manager, said that the company had changed the trajectory for “safety reasons” by lowering the apogee and increasing the portion of the flight over the Atlantic. “This was done to mitigate the affected area in the event of vehicle failure,” he wrote. He did not specify when the company made this decision.
“Performance of all vehicle subsystems was nominal, with no significant deviation or degradation in trajectory. “The vehicle flew perfectly,” he added.
PLD Space has offered Miura 1 for suborbital microgravity research, and this launch carried a payload for the German Center for Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM). However, the company viewed Miura 1 primarily as a technology demonstrator for its in-development Miura 5 small launch vehicle. It said Miura 1 would help validate 70% of the design and technology planned for Miura 5.
“We developed Miura 1 as a stepping stone to accelerate the technological progress of Miura 5. With the success of this mission, our team is ready to move quickly towards the first flight of Miura 5 – our ultimate goal,” said Raúl Verdú, co-founder and business development manager at PLD Space.
The launch makes PLD Space the “frontrunner in the European space race,” PLD Space chief executive Ezequiel Sánchez claimed, but it is unlikely the company will be the first European start-up to reach orbit. The company currently predicts a first launch of the Miura 5 in 2025 in Kourou, French Guiana.
Several other companies are planning initial market launches by then. Germany’s Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg are developing vehicles, the first launches of which are expected to take place next year. In the UK, Orbex and Skyrora are also working on small launch vehicles, although with no clear dates for their first launches.
PLD Space has stated that they are more focused on reliability than being first. “We obviously see a race to be first,” Verdú said in a panel discussion at World Satellite Business Week on September 12. “But I see that the biggest challenge is to be reliable.” For this reason, we at PLD Space made the decision to develop a demonstrator. We learned so much in Miura 1.”
The company had hoped to launch the Miura 1 earlier this year. A launch attempt at the end of May was canceled due to strong high-altitude winds. A second attempt on June 16 was aborted just as the vehicle’s engine ignited because a supply cable failed to detach from the rocket as expected. PLD Space concluded that the cable had come loose, but a tenth of a second later than planned, enough to trigger an abort by the flight computer.
The company announced in late June that it would delay its next launch attempt until at least September to comply with restrictions under Spanish law to prevent wildfires.
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