WASHINGTON — Spanish company PLD Space launched its first suborbital rocket Oct. 6, with the corporate calling the flight successful despite reaching a lower altitude than planned.
The corporate’s Miura 1 rocket lifted off from the El Arenosillo Experimentation Centre, a test site in southwestern Spain operated by the country’s National Institute for Aerospace Technology, at 8:19 p.m. Eastern (2:19 a.m. local time Oct. 7.) The rocket flew on a suborbital trajectory for 306 seconds before splashing down within the Atlantic Ocean. The corporate said in an announcement it was working to get well the rocket from the ocean.
The rocket reached a peak altitude of 46 kilometers on the flight. In a press kit issued before the launch, PLD Space said the rocket had a planned apogee of 80 kilometers and a flight time of 12 minutes.
PLD Space didn’t disclose why Miura 1 fell in need of its planned altitude but called the flight successful, stating that the vehicle achieved “all technical objectives” related to its performance.
“This test flight has yielded invaluable data, enabling us to validate crucial design elements and technologies that may underpin the event of our Miura 5 orbital launcher,” said Raúl Torres, co-founder of PLD Space and launch director for the mission, in an announcement.
PLD Space has offered Miura 1 for suborbital microgravity research, and this launch carried a payload for Germany’s Centre for Applied Space Technology and Microgravity, or ZARM. The corporate, though, considered Miura 1 primarily a technology demonstrator for its Miura 5 small launch vehicle in development. It said Miura 1 will help validate 70% of the design and technology planned for Miura 5.
“We developed Miura 1 as a steppingstone to speed up the technological advancement of Miura 5. With this mission’s success, our team is poised to rapidly progress towards the inaugural 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 within the European space race,” claimed Ezequiel Sánchez, PLD Space’s chief executive, but the corporate is unlikely to be the primary European launch startup to achieve orbit. The corporate is currently projecting a primary launch of Miura 5 in 2025 from Kourou, French Guiana.
Several other firms are planning first launches before then. Germany’s Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg are developing vehicles with first launches projected to happen by next yr. In the UK, Orbex and Skyrora are also working on small launch vehicles, although without clear dates for his or her first launches.
PLD Space has said they’re focused more on reliability than being first. “We see a race, after all, to be the primary one,” Verdú said in a panel discussion at World Satellite Business Week Sept. 12. “But I see probably the most difficult part is to be reliable. Because of this we made the choice at PLD Space to develop a demonstrator. We learned so many things in Miura 1.”
The corporate had hoped to launch Miura 1 earlier this yr. A launch attempt in late May was called off due to strong upper-level winds. A second attempt June 16 was aborted just because the vehicle’s engine ignited when an umbilical cable did not separate from the rocket as expected. PLD Space concluded that the cable had separated, but a tenth of a second later than planned, enough to trigger an abort by the flight computer.
The corporate said in late June that it could postpone the subsequent launch attempt until not less than September to comply with restrictions in Spanish law intended to forestall wildfires.