The Spanish Miura 1 rocket will try to take off for the first time at 2 a.m. on Saturday. This has been made known by PLD Space, the company responsible for the launch, who has also announced that the event can be followed live on YouTube, in a broadcast that will begin approximately one hour before the flight.
The suborbital microlauncher, 12.5 meters high and weighing more than 2,500 kilograms, will rise from the Médano del Loro launch base, at the “El Arenosillo” Experimentation Center of the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA), in Huelva. The only place from which the launch can be seen in person is the Parador de Mazagón beach, given that the rest of the nearby areas will have restricted access.
The flight is expected to last 12 minutes, 6 of which will be spent in microgravity—a practically total absence of gravitational force—and reach a height of 80 kilometers at apogee, the highest point of its journey. If all goes well, the adventure will end in the Atlantic Ocean, where two ships and a team of divers specialized in underwater operations will wait in the planned landing area to try to recover the Miura 1.
The main objective of the launch is to collect information to validate the developed technology and devise possible improvements. PLD Space’s idea is to transfer and integrate all the data accumulated in the Miura 5, an orbital launcher for small satellites that the company wants to begin marketing in 2025. The information to be collected includes the thrust of the engine in flight conditions, the behavior aerodynamics of the rocket, a validation of the trajectory tracking system and an analysis of the response to real space conditions.
“In this sense, every second that Miura 1 is in the air will be a second of success,” says the company.
In addition, Miura 1 will carry an experiment from the Center for Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM), which will try to study the conditions of almost total absence of gravity. Similar to the rocket developers, ZARM scientists want to gather information for further testing on future suborbital flights.
The announcement comes two days after PLD Space gave the green light to make new launch attempts on the Spanish ship, after the two failed attempts at the end of spring and a long summer of analysis to find out what had failed.
Despite having established a day and time for takeoff, the company does not rule out postponing it in the event that changes in weather conditions occur or technical anomalies appear that put the mission at risk. Even during the flight, the entity has prepared various scenarios that contemplate changes in the trajectory or poor behavior of some of the systems.
“The success rate of a first launch in the industry is approximately 45%,” Ezequiel Sánchez, executive president of the Spanish company, warned on Wednesday.
