Raúl Torres and Raúl Verdú founded the startup PLD Space in 2011. Then they were two 23-year-old students who were fond of rocketry with the dream of developing a vehicle that would reach space. Twelve years later, the company has become the first in the European private sector to successfully launch a self-made rocket, and has a workforce of 150 employees that it intends to double in the coming months. The road to get here, however, has been long and winding.
The story of the launch of Miura 1 begins in 2011, at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. There, the then students Raúl Torres and Raúl Verdú were second in the 49K entrepreneurship contest, with a strategic plan of only “12 sheets” to develop a rocket with the capacity to launch useful loads into the atmosphere, recalls Raúl Verdú in conversation with La Vanguard. With the €12,000 prize they founded Payload Aerospace, later renamed PLD Space.
In one year they evolved the strategic plan into a “very conscientious and professional” document of more than 500 pages, which was endorsed by the Center for Industrial Technological Development (CDTI) and earned them public-private financing of around one million euros.
The work then focused on developing the first liquid fuel engine in Spain and building the necessary facilities to test it at the Teruel airport, where PLD Space still has its test bench located today. It took four years of work by a team of six people to achieve the first engine ignition, in 2015. “Having shown that we were capable of making an engine was an incredible milestone at that time,” explains Verdú, who remembers the moment with the same excitement as the launch last October 7.
The first success opened the door to a larger financing round, of about 25 million euros, with which the company expanded the team to 20 people and began to develop the rest of the subsystems of its rocket, Miura 1. The process took others four years and it was not exactly a bed of roses, according to Verdú: “We have had administrative, technical, financial, corporate development, talent, credibility difficulties… it has been a bit of a journey through the desert.”
The company's co-founder remembers a particularly critical episode in May 2019 when, at an economically delicate time, a new version of the engine exploded in its first test, causing distrust among some shareholders. The ruling forced the team of 50 people that worked in the company to be reduced by half. “The night of the launch was not the only one that we did not sleep,” ironically summarizes Ezequiel Sánchez, executive director of the company, who now sees the moment as “the refoundation of PLD.”
The team successfully repeated the test in February 2020, but the pandemic conditioned the work in the following months. In November 2021 they finished assembling the rocket, and in the following 14 months the team carried out all the necessary tests, simulations and adjustments to face the launch with the maximum guarantees. Two aborted spring attempts followed, and the successful launch on 7 October. Between 2022 and 2023, the team replicated the complete launch sequence, from nine in the morning to two-thirty in the morning, dozens of times before the mission, explains Sánchez.
The long road to success of Miura 1 has laid the foundations for the takeoff of its older brother, Miura 5, a launcher with which the company wants to put satellites into orbit, to take place during the first quarter of 2026. The management team feels that the company has “matured” enough to take on the challenge that, they assure, will entail new difficulties.
