With the suborbital flight of the Miura 1, the rocket manufactured in Elche, at 2.19am on Saturday, Spain finally entered the ‘Space Race’.
Following two previous aborted launches, the historic flight lasted just over 5 minutes, reaching a height of 46 kilometres, placing the country in the select club of the ten world nations with space capabilities.
Designed and built in Elche, at the Torrellano Business Park, the Miura 1 took off from the Médano del Loro military base, a facility close to the El Arenosillo Experimentation Centre, in the Huelva town of Moguer. The date, October 7, will now be firmly engraved in the history of the country, as the day on which Spaun launched its first rocket into space, in addition to being the first private spacecraft in Europe to take off.
After just over 5 minutes of flight, the splashdown took place in the Atlantic, about 70 kilometres from the point launch, where it was scheduled to be picked up by a ship, the Libertad 6. Once the rocket and its payload are recovered, they will be analysed at the PLD facilities.
After this historic milestone for Spain and Europe, the Launch Director and co-founder of PLD Space, Raúl Torres, said that “this launch is the result of more than 12 years of hard work, but it is only the beginning of what is to come. Thanks to this experimental flight, we will be able to extract a large volume of information that will allow us to validate the design and technology that will serve as the basis for developing our orbital launcher, Miura 5,” he added.
