Third time the charm. PLD Space, the company from Elche that built the Miura 1, wants to make good on the popular saying and get the first reusable Spanish rocket into orbit. If successful, it would be a historic milestone for Spain, which would become the tenth country capable of placing a satellite in space. The United States, Russia, China, India, South Korea, France, Italy, New Zealand and Japan have achieved it before. The new attempt will take place this morning, with a launch window between two in the morning and ten in the morning. «We try again! MIURA 1 is prepared for its imminent first flight from the launch base in Huelva,” the firm commented on its social networks. “The day has come,” said Raúl Torres, one of the company’s founders.
At this time, preparations are going according to plan. In the middle of the afternoon, after six o’clock, Torres announced the beginning of the operation with the hoisting of the rocket on the takeoff ramp. An hour and a half later, the loading of the propellant – the substance responsible for propelling the device – began. Around that same time it was announced that the latest weather report was favorable.
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The Miura 1, named in honor of the well-known breed of Spanish bull, measures 12.5 meters – far from the 120 of Musk’s gigantic Starship, the largest and most powerful space rocket ever built – and is designed to lift payloads of 250 kilos at more than 150 kilometers high. On this first flight it carries 100 kilos of material from the German Center for Applied Space Technology and Microgravity. If all goes well, its duration will be twelve minutes, a period whose main objective is to collect as much information as possible for the company’s true objective, the Miura 5 orbital launcher, which should take off from French Guiana in 2024. Specifically, the engineers’ gaze in that intense – and perhaps historic – dozen minutes will focus on the thrust of the engine, the aerodynamic behavior of the rocket and all the subsystems and the monitoring of its trajectory, all under conditions of real flight.
The two previous attempts
Getting started in space technology is not easy. It happened to NASA and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and early 1960s. So, at the dawn of humanity’s first steps off the planet, errors were very frequent. More than half of the attempts ended in an explosion, according to the book ‘Interstellar Travel. History of the Voyager probes’. Added to the innumerable technical problems is the dependence on unpredictable weather.
Putting any device in space requires very precise atmospheric conditions. The surface wind speed cannot exceed 20km/h, the atmosphere must also be calm at altitude and there must be no approaching storm. In the first attempt of the Miura 1, which took place on May 31, it was the wind at altitude that forced the test to be cancelled. In the second, on June 17, it was an incident that arose just half a second from the end of the countdown. Raúl Torres, one of the co-founders of the firm, explained it: “We had an automatic abort due to the non-release of the avionics umbilicals, the rest were free and the engine had nominal thrust.”
The best thing about that failed test was that the rocket was not damaged. The real problem then was the arrival of summer. “We postpone the launch from September due to the mandatory compliance with the regulations in relation to the prevention of forest fires, the high temperatures in Huelva and the necessary coordination with the Civil Guard,” they explained. After these dates, the rocket returned to its launch base on September 5, where it has waited until today.
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