A Spanish launch company claimed success on Saturday after its suborbital Miura 1 rocket lifted off and achieved an altitude of 46 km before plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean.
Saturday’s launch from Southern Spain is exciting for several reasons, but most notably because PLD Space is the primary of Europe’s recent space launch firms to have some credible success. To that end, Saturday’s modest flight represented the dawn of the European business space age.
“This launch culminates over 12 years of relentless effort, yet it marks just the beginning of our journey,” said PLD Space Launch director and co-founder Raúl Torres in a press release after the launch. “This test flight has yielded useful data, enabling us to validate crucial design elements and technologies that can underpin the event of our Miura 5 orbital launcher.”
Details of the flight
Before the launch, PLD Space said its goals for the debut launch of Miura 1 were to realize 12 minutes of flight and 6 minutes of microgravity for a scientific payload provided by the German Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM), after which to succeed in an altitude of 80 km and get well the rocket and payload 4 hours after the flight.
The corporate fell wanting most of those objectives. The mission lasted for five minutes and 6 seconds, with a maximum altitude of a bit greater than half its goal. Later, PLD Space also said it couldn’t get well the rocket from the Atlantic Ocean. Still, the experimental rocket cleared the pad and reached lots of its technical milestones. For the primary trip, it did fairly well.
In a news release, PLD Space claimed that Saturday’s flight marked “the launch of the primary private European rocket.” Technically, this will not be true. A Scotland-based company, Skyrora, launched its suborbital Skylark L booster from Iceland a 12 months ago, meaning to reach an altitude of about 100 km. The flight fell far wanting these goals, nevertheless, experiencing an anomaly shortly after liftoff and rising only to about 500 meters. Also, a Dutch-sounding rocket startup, T-Minus Engineering, said it launched two micro rockets to an altitude of 185 km.
Nevertheless, the Miura 1 launch is a reputable success for PLD Space, which was founded a dozen years ago by Torres and Raúl Verdú. The performance of the vehicle supports the corporate’s technical approach to the event of the Miura 5 rocket, which will likely be able to reaching orbit. Verdú said data from the launch of Miura 1 validates about 70 percent of the design of the larger rocket.
PLD Space goals to launch the Miura 5 as early as 2025 from the European spaceport in French Guiana and start business service in 2026.
A frothy competition
The energy and excitement from the company’s webcast was infectious, which bodes well for the long run of the European launch industry. Beyond Spain, the countries of Germany, Great Britain, and France all have developing business launch industries.
There are perhaps as many as eight or 10 European firms with a reputable likelihood of reaching orbit over the following five years with small launch vehicles, and there may be finally some government support for the industry. The European Space Agency has provided modest amounts of funding through its boost! program. Perhaps more importantly, the German government recently said European nations should procure launch services through open competitions fairly than awarding them to Arianespace by default.
Arianespace has held a state-sanctioned monopoly for many years, but in recent times, two aspects have combined to boost questions on the long run of that dominance. The primary is the rise of business launch firms, particularly in Germany, where a number of the most well-funded and technically advanced startups have formed.
The second factor is the performance of Arianespace vehicles. The corporate has had to desert its use of the Russian Soyuz for medium-lift launches because of the continuing war in Ukraine. Moreover, there have been development issues and launch failures with the smaller Vega C rocket. Finally, the event timeline for the continent’s flagship rocket, the Ariane 6, continues to slide. It’s now unlikely to make its debut before mid-2024, forcing European countries to obtain launch services elsewhere, including from Arianespace’s leading rival, SpaceX.
Yet the nascent business launch industry finds itself in perilous waters. These firms are having to scale up to satisfy the demands of constructing orbital vehicles at a time when enterprise funding is increasingly difficult to acquire. The launch bankruptcies now we have seen in the USA with firms equivalent to Vector and Virgin Orbit are equally likely in Europe because the competition continues.
Because of this, if the industry is to succeed, it seems incumbent upon the European Space Agency and nations to offer guaranteed launch contracts to make sure the startups don’t fold before flying. The success of Miura 1 this week should embolden supporters of this approach.