WASHINGTON — Spanish launch startup PLD Space plans to conduct a suborbital launch before the tip of the month to check technologies for its small orbital launch vehicle.
PLD Space said May 18 that it conducted a static-fire test a day earlier of its Miura 1 rocket on the pad at El Arenosillo, a site on the coast in southwestern Spain operated by the federal government’s National Institute for Aerospace Technology (INTA). Within the test, the rocket fired its engine for five seconds to verify it was working as intended.
The test clears the best way for a suborbital launch of Miura 1 in a window approved by INTA that runs through May 31. The corporate said it couldn’t disclose a particular launch date, citing security, weather, and the “dynamics involved within the launch operations.” It said that, once it sets a date after completing an INTA flight review, it can announce it as much as 48 hours prematurely.
Miura 1 is principally a technology demonstrator for Miura 5, a small launch vehicle the corporate is developing able to placing as much as 500 kilograms into orbit starting as soon as 2025.
“The target of this primary flight of the Miura 1 SN1 technology demonstrator might be to collect as much information as possible to further validate much of the design and technology that may later be transferred and integrated into Miura 5,” Raul Torres, co-founder and chief executive of PLD Space, said in a press release.
The corporate has not announced specific goals, corresponding to altitude or flight time, for the Miura 1 launch. The corporate’s website says the rocket is able to going as much as 150 kilometers on a 12-minute flight.
“On this experimental flight, our definition of success is that the rocket must be as far-off from the launch pad as possible,” Ezequiel Sanchez, executive president of PLD Space, said within the statement. “For each second Miura 1 is within the air, we might be learning and gathering data for the event of Miura 5.”
PLD Space is one in all several European corporations working on small launch vehicles. A few of those corporations are planning their first orbital launches as soon as late this yr, ahead of PLD Space.
That’s positive with the corporate. “For us, it’s not super necessary to be the primary one in Europe to launch a rocket into space,” said Raúl Verdú, PLD Space’s chief business development officer, at a conference in February. “Our vision is to have the most effective success rate in the subsequent decade, because that may make the difference.”
PLD Space has raised 60 million euros ($65 million) thus far. The corporate said in March it was working on a Series C round of 150 million euros that may support development of the Miura 5 and starting of business operations.