The success of the maiden flight of Miura 1, the first private rocket developed in Europe, has validated that each of the ship's subsystems function properly. The experience provides key information for the construction of Miura 5, the launcher with which PLD Space, the development company, wants to provide Spain with its own capacity to put satellites into orbit. The data collected will allow one thousand improvement points to be transferred to the Miura 5 rocket, whose launch is scheduled for the first quarter of 2026.
The success of the mission has meant “a series of many firsts,” according to Raúl Torres, co-founder and CEO of PLD Space and launch director, at a press conference. The entity has been the first private company in Europe to successfully launch a rocket, making Spain the tenth country in the world with its own capacity to reach space, but it has also achieved the first launch of a rocket from continental Europe, among other pioneering successes.
In short, Torres asserts, PLD Space has managed to position Spain with a new capacity, that of sending rockets into space.
“The pitcher did what he had to do,” said the pitching director. The PLD Space team ensures that all the rocket's subsystems behaved as expected, that the trajectory was completed perfectly and that all phases of the mission were executed successfully, with the exception of device recovery.
The rocket could not be recovered even though it fell within the expected area. “We believe that the impact was lateral [...] and we suspect that one of the fuel tanks broke, when it broke, water entered and the rocket sank,” summarizes the company's co-founder. The reason behind the error, the developers believe, is that the lateral winds at altitude deflected the parachute that was supposed to stop the device in such a way that the rocket fell on its side.
For the company, not having been able to complete the recovery of the Miura 1 is a detail that does not cloud the success of the mission. “There will have been about 6,500 rocket launches in human history; Around 100 have been recovered,” explains Ezequiel Sánchez, executive president of PLD Space, “and the companies that have recovered it have begun to do so from the fifth or tenth launch,” he adds.
“We have gone from predicting how things are going to behave in flight to knowing how things behave in flight, and that technical leap is fundamental in the industry,” says Torres. This is especially important in the case of aerodynamics, “one of the most difficult things to get information out of, because you can't put anything that size at supersonic speeds unless you actually throw it and measure it.”
The models managed by PLD Space had “around 40% uncertainty” in the aerodynamics of reentry, so the result of the mission was “better than expected,” according to Torres. Something similar happens with the braking system, which worked successfully even though the prediction was complicated to carry out.
“During the entire reentry phase we also collected a large amount of aerodynamic and aerothermodynamic data,” that is, how the air collides with the vehicle and how it heats it. “All this is very important because it will help improve the aerodynamic models of Miura 5, which will be essential so that the efficiency of the launcher when it flies is what we want,” concludes the launch director.
Gathering information for the development of Miura 5 was the main objective of the mission. “We transferred more than a thousand points of improvement, more than a thousand actions have come from the development of Miura 1 that will now be extrapolated to Miura 5, and we have managed to validate many prediction models, something super important because we no longer only work with simulations, but now we work with flight data,” highlights Torres.
The entity's plans include finishing developing the Miura 5 rocket in the next two years, so that the first flight attempts can be carried out in the first quarter of 2026. With the orbital launcher, PLD Space plans to launch into orbit satellites of up to 500 kilograms that serve multiple purposes: telecommunications, observation, navigation, space logistics and even defense.
“PLD Space right now has commercial opportunities worth 320 million euros,” Raúl Verdú, co-founder and CBDO of the company, stated in a press conference. “The credibility that clients give us now is total.”
PLD Space successfully launched the Miura 1 rocket from the El Arenosillo Experimentation Center, in Huelva, in the early hours of October 7, after two failed attempts last spring. Initially, the flight was scheduled to last about 12 minutes and rise to a height of 80 kilometers. However, the final journey was just 5 minutes, in which the rocket reached 2,600 kilometers per hour and touched an altitude of 50 kilometers. The reason for the changes, the company says, was security.
“The winds at altitude and the safety study showed that in the event of a launcher failure during flight, an environment of debris could be generated that could go outside the safety zone,” Torres pointed out. That is, if the rocket had failed and exploded, some fragment of the rocket could have fallen beyond the exclusion zone. To minimize the risk, the company chose to flatten the trajectory, lengthening it at the cost of losing height, to ensure that the rocket was above the ocean from practically the first moment.
