The launch of the first Spanish rocket into space will have to wait. Adverse weather conditions have forced the takeoff of the Miura 1 scheduled for this Wednesday at 8:30 am from the Médano del Loro military base in Moguer (Huelva) to be postponed.
The Elche company PLD Space, in charge of designing and building the rocket, has announced via streaming, through Sara Poveda, PLD Space’s first employee, and Roberto Palacios, MIURA 5 systems engineer – the reusable rocket that will be launched in 2024 from French Guiana-, that the suspension was due to “strong gusts of wind in height, of more than 30 meters per second, exceeding the established limit”.
The mission was aborted after going through the entire launch timeline sequence, which turned out to be correct. Last week the operation had to be aborted due to the weather. The Spanish company will look for a new launch window to carry out this first launch of the Miura 1, the first launched by a private company in Europe. “It’s a shame because the chronology was fine, we have reached the point of final tank loads; today has been like this, we will try it in the next few days,” Palacios indicated.
The launch of the rocket was going to be coordinated from the El Arenosillo Experimentation Center of the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA), facilities very close to the Médano del Loro base. The Miura 1 has been in them since last March, precisely for the development of the latest tests necessary to launch it into space.
According to PLD Space, this first flight will allow “gathering the largest volume of information possible for the validation and design of the technology that will later be transferred and integrated into Miura 5”, and will enable the ZARM Research Institute to study microgravity conditions by collecting information necessary to conduct scientific experiments on future suborbital flights.
The flight has a scheduled duration of 6 minutes in which microgravity and apogee conditions are reached at 80 kilometers high. Finally, a team from PLD Space will be in charge of collecting the rocket in the Atlantic once the landing is complete. Every second that Miura 1 is in the air “will be a second of success and a milestone for us,” PLD Space remarked before the postponed takeoff.
We will have to wait to see the Miura 1, named after the wild cattle and as a symbol of the Spanish brand, become the first one hundred percent Spanish private rocket to go into space and thereby value the work that began in 2012 in Elche ( Alicante) the engineers Raúl Torres and Raúl Verdú with 3,000 euros, which today translates into three offices and more than a hundred employees. The company has secured more than $65 million in financing to date.
