The company PLD Space will start expansion works at its headquarters in Teruel airport next year initiated by the successful launch, early on October 7, of his Miura 1 rocket from Huelva.
The company, which recently built a new test bench, plans to make another seven in the area it recently acquired to expand its facilities in Teruel. No time wasting, PLD Space starts next week in this place your campaign to test enginesstructures and first and second-stage gas generators in Miura 5the successor to the Miura 1.
The victory of the Miura 1 flight made PLD Space the first private company in Europe to launch a rocket the first Spanish company to manage the position of the country with the capacity to propel a vehicle into space, the first in Europe to develop and launch a liquid fuel engine powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen and the first achieved a space launch from continental Europe -Until now they have all been in French Guiana, on the coast of South America.
From left to right, Raúl Verdú, co-founder and head of Business Development; Ezequiel Sánchez, executive president of PLD Space; and Raúl Torres, co-founder and CEO of the company.Herald
The founders of the company, Raúl Verdú, and Raúl Torres, and the person responsible for Business Development, Ezequiel Sanchez, announced this Friday that the Miura 1 mission has been accomplished “a complete success”. They did this at the press conference held in Madrid to present the results of the flight, where they also emphasized that the experience of the first rocket will allow you to move more than a thousand points of improvement of subsystems to the Miura 5 as well as speed up the development of the future orbital vehicle and reduce the risk of its technology.
The spacecraft flew, following all the planned parameters, for 306 seconds, reaching a height of 46 kilometers. It landed in the Atlantic, within the expected impact zone, although contact with water occurred laterally and caused the destruction of one of its tanks. filling with water and submerging the vehicle. After eight hours of search operations, with the support of the Army, PLD Space decided to abort the activity, although the recovery of the ship was not the priority goal.
The Miura 5which will triple the dimensions of its predecessor, quintuple the number of engines from one to five, and put microsatellites for private clients and governments into orbit, has sparked commercial interest worth 320 million euros since the start of this year which guarantees the financing of new launches.
As announced by those responsible for PLD Space, the Miura 5 will be completed by the end of 2025 and its commercial flights will start in 2026 from the European spaceport in Kourou, in French Guiana, to go up to 30 in 2030.
PLD Space wants to put Spain at the epicenter of the European space sector. It currently has more than 150 employees from 12 countries at its headquarters in Teruel and Elche (Alicante) and It plans to double its workforce to 300 workers by 2024.
