MIURA 1, the first Spanish rocket, will have to wait to reach its place in space. From the military base of Médano del Loro, in Moguer (Huelva), the PLD Space company has decided to postpone the maiden flight of its space vehicle. The reason would be in the strong gusts of wind that have been detected in the heights. Unfortunately, it is not the first time that the operation has been aborted, and the thing is that the same thing happened last week for weather reasons.
The launch of the MIURA 1 had been scheduled for 8:00 a.m. on May 31, and said window would close two hours later, at exactly 10:00 a.m. However, from 6:40 a.m., PLD Space already communicated that they were analyzing an unusual behavior in the liquid oxygen load.
The good news is that this last bug was fixed quickly, around 7:00 a.m. The takeoff of MIURA 1 was then rescheduled at 8:30, although a few minutes before the scheduled time, those responsible for the project announced its cancellation. Sara Poveda, first employee of PLD Space, and Roberto Palacios, MIURA 5 systems engineer, were the first to communicate the refusal. In their message, they claimed that there were “strong gusts of wind at height, out of bounds.”
“We have been monitoring the winds at height all night, with values greater than 20 meters per second and gusts of up to 30 meters per second between kilometers 8 and 12”, commented shortly after Raúl Torres, co-founder and CEO of PLD Space. “Prudence asks us not to advance“He concluded in his statement.
MIURA 1, the first Spanish rocket, will have to wait a little longer to discover space
For his part, the MIURA 1 was already fully ready for takeoff. Two weeks ago he had successfully passed the hot test of five seconds. This last procedure is the one that allows knowing the behavior of the engines, and it is an absolutely necessary step for the flight test.
The MIURA 1 flight had an estimated duration of six minutes. Once it reached 80 km in height, microgravity and apogee conditions would make an appearance. From this moment, a team from the same PLD Space would be in charge of collecting the body of the rocket in the Atlantic Oceanplace chosen to make the splashdown of the vehicle.
In the course of this time, the PLD Space team could study some variables not observed so far. Among them, analyzing the thrust of the engine during the flight, monitoring the nominal trajectory and examining the behavior of all subsystems and the exposure of the rocket to real space conditions.
Nevertheless, it seems that the PLD Space team will have to wait to obtain the desired information. Although today the last available date was marked in the MIURA 1 launch window, the National Institute of Aerospace Technology should not take too long to offer a new date.