PLD Space Will Shift to Bigger Launch Vehicles and Crewed Spacecraft
10th Oct 2024
PLD Space, a Spanish startup in the field of launch vehicles has outlined the plans to work on reusable rockets as well as crewed spacecraft in the future. These will come after the development of the current small launch vehicle that PLD Space is creating.
The company spoke about its goal to be a top private spaceflight company during an event in Elche on 7th October. This marked a year since the company launched its first ever suborbital rocket, the Miura 1.
Since then, the company has been working largely on the Miura 5. This is a small launch vehicle that has the capacity to take up to 500 kg into sub-synchronous orbit. It hopes to launch from Guiana Space Centre in early 2026.
The plan for this mission is to recover the first stage and reuse it after it has splashed down. However, it seems the company will now be pivoting to the SpaceX approach (used in Falcon 9) of propulsive landing of the first stage.
PLD Space and the change to reusability
CEO Raúl Torres recently spoke about this issue and how the approach was changed: “If you see an airplane from Boeing or an airplane from Airbus, the way of landing is the same,” he explained: “The only way to make a stage reusable is bringing it back in the same fashion that SpaceX or Blue Origin is doing.”
Plans for a bigger launch vehicle that could deliver payloads of up to 13,580 kg to low-earth orbit and nearly 4,600 kg to geostationary transfer orbit. This will be called the Miura Next.
A proposed second vehicle called the Miura Next Heavy also plans to use two more first stages as side boosters like the Falcon Heavy does. In theory this could place up to 36,000 kilograms into LEO.
Another vehicle Miura Next Super Heavy plans to expand that capacity even further and would use four first stages as side boosters, arranged in a similar way to Russia’s Angara A5 launch vehicle.
Raúl Torres said that the Super Heavy version of the vehicle could be reserved for ambitious interplanetary missions. “We are bringing a huge quantity of payload to the moon and Mars.”
Launches are planned to take place in the early 2030s.
A Step Into Crewed Missions
Lince is the title of the mission to send a crewed mission to space. Under the plans and a mockup revealed by the company, the capsule would be able to carry four to five people to LEO.
This is not going to be cheap and Torres explained that Lince could cost about 700 million euros, potentially investors at the event. More investors may be intrigued by the shift to larger vehicles, and Torres explained that Europe was lacking a plan when compared to China and the US and that nothing had been put in place to follow on from the Ariane 6. “What we are saying that at PLD we have a plan to cover that. There’s a plan to, in the future, have the same infrastructure as others.”
This mission was secret to some of the company’s own staff, with more than three-quarters of them knowing nothing about the mission. The first Lince flight could take place as a test in 2030 launching on the Miura Next before splashdown in the Atlantic or Mediterranean Sea, but much will depend on the funding of PLD Space.
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