Miura 5

The Miura 5 has been designed to reuse the majority of the technology developed for the preceding Miura 1. However, many of these technologies will be refined substantially to incorporate lessons learnt with the earlier rocket. New design elements include the propellant tanks and engine; it remains a liquid fuel rocket. Many elements of the Miura 5, including the propulsion system, structures, and avionics development, will be designed and produced in-house. The Miura 5 is to be propelled by a single TEPREL-C turbopump engine, unlike its predecessor, which used a pressurized tank cycle instead. A key feature of the Miura 5 is its reusable first stage. The recovery process shall employ a combination of engine thrust and parachutes. While furnished with a larger parachute arrangement to account for the larger scale of the Miura 5, the various subsystems controlling the recovery are identical those used on the Miura 1. The Miura 5 was originally envisioned to have a lift capacity of 150 kilograms; in comparison to Vega, Arianespace’s smallest launcher, it was to be capable of carrying roughly one-tenth of the payload. == Development==

LPSR Program During October 2016, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced the selection of the Spanish aerospace start-up PLD Space as the main contractor of the LPSR ("Liquid Propulsion Stage Recovery") program, one part of the agency's Future Launchers Preparatory Programme (FLPP). Test flights and partnerships On 11 April 2019, with the assistance of the Spanish Army, PLD Space performed a successful drop and recovery test of the first stage of a Miura 5 demonstrator at El Arenosillo Test Center. This demonstration stage, which had a reduced 1.5 m diameter instead of 1.8 m, was dropped by a Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopter from a height of 5 km. It slowed its rate of descent using a total of three parachutes before performing a water landing, at which point it had been descending at a rate of roughly ten meters per second. The demonstrator was recovered by divers and brought back to Mazagón by a tugboat to be thoroughly examined. During July 2019, it was announced that PLD Space had reached an agreement with the French space agency CNES to study the launch of Miura 5 at the Guiana Space Centre (CSG) in French Guiana. Under a separate arrangement, the Spanish agency National Institute for Aerospace Technology (INTA) has also worked with PLD Space in securing a launch site at the El Hierro Launch Centre, which has been claimed by the company to be the optimal choice from a technical perspective. PLD Space has also publicly commented on the possibility of conducting launches from the planned spaceport in Azores, but the status of this proposal is presently uncertain. ==Launch schedule==

As of December 2023, the first test flight of Miura 5 is expected to take place sometime in early 2026. The initial model, which is planned to be used for the first two flights, will be entirely expendable. It will be superseded by an improved model of the Miura 5 that uses the recoverable first stage, which is intended to perform the planned commercial launches. ==See also==