A Spanish launch company claimed success on Saturday after its suborbital Miura 1 rocket lifted off and achieved an altitude of 46 km before plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean.

Saturday's launch from Southern Spain is exciting for several reasons, but most notably because PLD Space is the first of Europe's new space launch companies to have some credible success. To that end, Saturday's modest flight represented the dawn of the European commercial space age.

"This launch culminates over 12 years of relentless effort, yet it marks just the start of our journey," said PLD Space Launch director and co-founder Raúl Torres in a statement after the launch. "This test flight has yielded valuable data, enabling us to validate crucial design elements and technologies that will underpin the development of our Miura 5 orbital launcher."

Details of the flight

Before the launch, PLD Space said its goals for the debut launch of Miura 1 were to achieve 12 minutes of flight and six minutes of microgravity for a scientific payload provided by the German Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM), and then to reach an altitude of 80 km and recover the rocket and payload four hours after the flight.

The company fell short of most of these objectives. The mission lasted for five minutes and six seconds, with a maximum altitude of a little more than half its goal. Later, PLD Space also said it could not recover the rocket from the Atlantic Ocean. Still, the experimental rocket cleared the pad and reached many of its technical milestones. For the first time out, it did rather well.

In a news release, PLD Space claimed that Saturday's flight marked "the launch of the first private European rocket." Technically, this is not true. A Scotland-based company, Skyrora, launched its suborbital Skylark L booster from Iceland a year ago, intending to reach an altitude of about 100 km. The flight fell far short of these aims, however, experiencing an anomaly shortly after liftoff and rising only to about 500 meters. Also, a Dutch-sounding rocket startup, T-Minus Engineering, said it launched two micro rockets to an altitude of 185 km.

Nevertheless, the Miura 1 launch is a credible success for PLD Space, which was founded a dozen years ago by Torres and Raúl Verdú. The performance of the vehicle supports the company's technical approach to the development of the Miura 5 rocket, which will be capable of reaching orbit. Verdú said data from the launch of Miura 1 validates about 70 percent of the design of the larger rocket.

PLD Space aims to launch the Miura 5 as early as 2025 from the European spaceport in French Guiana and commence commercial service in 2026.

A frothy competition

The energy and excitement from the company's webcast was infectious, which bodes well for the future of the European launch industry. Beyond Spain, the countries of Germany, Great Britain, and France all have developing commercial launch industries.

There are perhaps as many as eight or 10 European companies with a credible chance of reaching orbit over the next five years with small launch vehicles, and there is finally some government support for the industry. The European Space Agency has provided modest amounts of funding through its boost! program. Perhaps more importantly, the German government recently said European nations should procure launch services through open competitions rather than awarding them to Arianespace by default.

Arianespace has held a state-sanctioned monopoly for decades, but in recent years, two factors have combined to raise questions about the future of that dominance. The first is the rise of commercial launch companies, particularly in Germany, where some of the most well-funded and technically advanced startups have formed.

The second factor is the performance of Arianespace vehicles. The company has had to abandon its use of the Russian Soyuz for medium-lift launches due to the ongoing war in Ukraine. Additionally, there have been development issues and launch failures with the smaller Vega C rocket. Finally, the development timeline for the continent's flagship rocket, the Ariane 6, continues to slip. It is now unlikely to make its debut before mid-2024, forcing European countries to procure launch services elsewhere, including from Arianespace's leading rival, SpaceX.

Yet the nascent commercial launch industry finds itself in perilous waters. These companies are having to scale up to meet the demands of building orbital vehicles at a time when venture funding is increasingly difficult to obtain. The launch bankruptcies we have seen in the United States with companies such as Vector and Virgin Orbit are equally likely in Europe as the competition continues.

For this reason, if the industry is to succeed, it seems incumbent upon the European Space Agency and nations to provide guaranteed launch contracts to ensure the startups do not fold before flying. The success of Miura 1 this week should embolden supporters of this approach.