Whether in the Elche factory, on a test bench at Teruel airport or on the launch pad under construction in French Guiana, PLD Space is abuzz. The company advances one milestone per week and he tells us why: the Miura 5 rocket is practically ready at the design level.
“I would tell you that it is 99%,” says Raúl Torres, CEO of the company, in an interview with Xataka. Candidate to become the Europe’s first private orbital rocketthe Miura 5 is about to finish the Critical Design Review (CDR) and take shape for the first time.
“Now we are finishing the QM1 qualification models and starting the QM2, which means that shortly, and I’ll leave it there, we are going to have a first teachable Miura 5,” he reveals for the first time. This first fully integrated model will not fly, but will allow PLD to close engineering fronts and carry out key tests before the end of the year.
If everything goes according to plan, the rocket chosen to take off will begin assembly in January. “The idea would be that in May we would be in Guyana to start doing the combined tests with the French space agency CNES,” confirms Torres, adjusting the schedule that originally pointed to a launch at the end of 2025.
It is not an unexpected adjustment, but it was pending official confirmation since Chris Larmour, founder of Orbex, PLD’s British competitor, 1,000 euros were bet with Raúl Torres that the Miura 5 would not fly in 2025. Raúl accepted the bet. Will he pay Larmour now?
“We have invited him to come sign the rocket at the end of the year, we are waiting for him to answer us,” says Torres. “I would like Orbex to also invite me at the end of the year to sign their rocket. Mine is going to sign it, so I only have to pay half of the bet.”
Works in Guayana, lighting in Teruel
If the Miura 5 flies in early 2026, PLD Space will be one of the fastest companies to have developed an orbital launcher, which is even more impressive considering the Spanish company’s financing compared to several of its competitors.
But PLD Space is not starting from scratch. The successful launch of the Miura 1 suborbital rocket in October 2023 was the graduation of a team that now faces a higher challenge. “Miura 1 has been like primary school, ESO and high school, and now we are at university,” explains Torres.
“That is why we have developed Miura 5 so quickly, because we have gone one step ahead with many developments.” Technologies such as the stage power system, cryogenic protections or the welding techniques of the Miura 5 are a direct inheritance from its little brother.
However, “university” brings new and more complicated subjects. The most obvious technological leap is in the Miura 5 engines. The five TEPREL-C of the first stage and the vacuum-optimized TEPREL-C of the second They are beasts of another categoryespecially due to the introduction of turbopumps.
PLD has developed most of the critical components in-house, such as liquid oxygen and kerosene valves. Combustion chambers are manufactured by electroplating copper and nickel, turbopump housings are 3D printed, and high-precision rotating components are machined. The objective is to achieve a production rate that allows one engine to be manufactured every two weeks in the Elche warehouse.
PLD Space passed a fundamental milestone on October 6 with the first static ignition of a fully integrated TEPREL-C Vac in its facilities at Teruel airport. With 75 kN of thrust, it is one of the most powerful vacuum engines ever powered by a private company in Europe. But the real muscle of the rocket will be in the five TEPREL-C engines responsible for takeoff. Each one has 190 kN of thrust, almost double than its competitors.
When will we see the first roar of a Miura 5 with the TEPREL-C fully integrated? “In one quarter you should expect the long and qualification tests of both the first and second stages, and also the restart test of both engines,” Torres told Xataka.
To validate each component, PLD Space has also deployed new infrastructure at the Teruel airport. The T3 bench has been the protagonist of the static and compression tests of the rocket structures. Valves and gas generators are tested on bench T6. Bench T7 will be used for qualification of first stage Teprel-C engines and second stage long duration ignitions. The T9 bench will be used to test the separation between the first and second stages.
Meanwhile, thousands of kilometers across the Atlantic, PLD Space construction in French Guiana has begun. PLD has become the first New Space company to begin construction of its own launch base at the Guyana Space Center.
“It is very likely that Miura 5 will be before Kourou’s works,” says Torres. The first structures of the launch pad They are being built in Spain. The rocket should arrive in South America in May.
Advances in reuse since flight 1
Inspired by SpaceX, PLD does not conceive of a modern launcher without reuse. And their plan for the Miura 5 is to start collecting landing data from the first flight. If it achieves stage separation on its debut launch, the rocket will perform a maneuver boostback like that of the Falcon 9.
“In flight one mission, in the test flight that we will do next year, we are going to try to re-enter the stage,” confirms Torres. After separation, the rocket will turn around and turn on its central engine for a few seconds to brake. “The booster will be ready to re-enter. We don’t want to miss the slightest opportunity to collect data.” And he talks about data because he does not expect to recover the rocket.
“Evidently, it’s not going to happen the first time.” The first flight won’t even have a parachute. The main objective is to survive reentry from a hypersonic speed at Mach 11. “The problem we have today is that the rocket re-enters, but it burns. We need to understand how much it burns, map the temperature and pressure environments around the rocket and then, based on that, redo the engineering.”
It will be an iterative process similar to what SpaceX followed. The PLD plan is to ensure that in 2028, the Miura 5 Block 1.2 can perform a propulsive landing. That is, landing by maneuvering with its engines, just as the Falcon 9 does.
The PLD Space headquarters and factory in Elche
Can PLD Space become the European SpaceX? Torres is convinced that it will be one of the two large launchers in Europe, but considers that the company is underfunded compared to direct competitors such as the German Isar Aerospace.
“The fact that we are in Spain in some way penalizes us,” he comments. “We have been the company that has developed an orbital rocket in Europe the fastest in history, and we have done it with the right amount of money, on par with the main American companies that have one or two orders of magnitude more money than us.”
His vision of today’s European space sector is one of “much ado about nothing.” Torres believes that the strategic decisions to bet on European champions like PLD should have been made years ago.
Despite everything, he is sure that in 2026 the Miura 5 will be the first private rocket in Europe to offer access to space independently.” A promising future that they see increasingly closer in a modern hangar in Elche.
Images | PLD Space
In Xataka | PLD Space has a detailed plan to become Europe’s rocket factory. And the pieces have started to fit
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