The Elche company PLD Space aborted early this Saturday morning the second attempt to launch the Spanish Miura 1 rocket from the Médano del Loro military base, in Moguer (Huelva). On May 31, the first attempt in the final phase had to be aborted due to strong gusts of wind at altitude, which did not guarantee safety.
The frustrated launch was stopped at 2:43 a.m., just after the countdown had finished and the ship’s engine started to ignite due to problems that the engineers have not specified. PLS Space has also failed to clarify whether the abortion was voluntary or forced.
On May 31, the mission was already aborted after having carried out the complete sequence of the launch chronology, all of which was correct, reaching the point of final tank loads. Although that day the countdown was not reached. Since then the company had been analyzing the weather conditions while waiting to open a new launch window.
The main objective of this first flight is to verify the operation of key technologies in flight, something that to date has not been possible: the thrust profile of the engine in flight conditions, the aerodynamic behavior of the launcher, the monitoring of the nominal trajectory , the nominal behavior of all subsystems under real conditions and exposure to real spatial conditions.
This 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 the Miura 5,” explains the firm in a statement collected by the Efe agency.
In addition, the mission will enable the ZARM Research Institute to study microgravity conditions by collecting information necessary to carry out scientific experiments in future suborbital flights.
The flight must have a duration of just six 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 Ocean, where it must land.
